Sep 1, 2026 · 38 min · 10 segments
**DISCLAIMER**: **None of today's video should be used as medical advice. I am not a doctor, nor do I have any degrees in psychology/medication/etc. Only take medication under the supervision of a…
A lot of people have told me that ADHD symptoms look like the kid in class who can't sit still, the adult who's always working out, the guy who can never hold down a job for very long, or the stoner who's always chasing the next high.
These common ideas certainly aren't the full picture, but they're also not entirely false.
So the question becomes, what actually is ADHD? While spending all of my formative years in a Catholic cult, I always heard from people that the problem with psychology is that none of it was objective or based on actual physical patterns in the brain or structures, and therefore these diagnoses didn't really mean anything because no objective tests were ran at the psychologist's office.
And while I find that a very brave concept from a religious movement, I'll ignore that for a second.
One way some neuroscientists explain ADHD is that all of the parts of your brain function normally, but at different levels of activation.
Think about all of the different parts of your brain, the fear center like the amygdala, the decision center like your prefrontal cortex, the memory storage areas, which I don't even know the name of that one, and so many other ideas.
You have to be able to get all of these parts of the brain to talk to each other to have a normally functioning brain, or one that functions like the average person.
And on an MRI scan, what a brain with ADHD can look like is that the parts of the brain don't always talk well to each other.
This is because the wiring between them is not working well, and that each part is actually working at a different level.
To go into my own backstory, I remember in elementary school, I did really well, and so I think my parents and I thought that I couldn't have ADHD.
But the thing is that I went to a great Catholic school and had teachers that were very attentive and flexible enough to help me hit learning targets but through my own very narrow interests at a particular time.
I was almost always in gifted programs in school and the principal even offered me to skip two grades ahead for middle school which for unrelated reasons my family said no to which I think was the correct decision.
I remember as I got into middle school and then high school I wasn't as gifted as I was in elementary school.
My family's expectation was to get all As, and so I did well in school, taking honors and AP classes, and only had three Bs or something for all of high school.
But the only reason I could pull that all off was that I was doing my homework during caffeine-induced all-nighters and compensating by being good at cram studying.
It turns out that knowing how teachers structured tests and just studying those particular things is actually quite a good life skill.
The confusing part about ADHD specifically is that I had the ability to do really well on subjects I was passionate about.
For example, instead of writing papers, I started making iMovies in elementary school, spending dozens of hours going above and beyond.
I remember one time in middle school social studies, I spent some 40 hours making the best video ever about ice skating.
And then when I got to class, I realized that my peers actually only spent like an hour or two on their projects.
And needless to say, I could spend an absurd amount of time getting 100% on certain grades that I liked.
And then I could barely focus even for a single day on classes I wasn't hyper passionate about at any given time.
A lot of people have told me that ADHD symptoms look like the kid in class who can't sit still, the adult who's always working out, the guy who can never hold down a job for very long, or the stoner who's always chasing the next high.
These common ideas certainly aren't the full picture, but they're also not entirely false.
So the question becomes, what actually is ADHD? While spending all of my formative years in a Catholic cult, I always heard from people that the problem with psychology is that none of it was objective or based on actual physical patterns in the brain or structures, and therefore these diagnoses didn't really mean anything because no objective tests were ran at the psychologist's office.
And while I find that a very brave concept from a religious movement, I'll ignore that for a second.
One way some neuroscientists explain ADHD is that all of the parts of your brain function normally, but at different levels of activation.
Think about all of the different parts of your brain, the fear center like the amygdala, the decision center like your prefrontal cortex, the memory storage areas, which I don't even know the name of that one, and so many other ideas.
You have to be able to get all of these parts of the brain to talk to each other to have a normally functioning brain, or one that functions like the average person.
And on an MRI scan, what a brain with ADHD can look like is that the parts of the brain don't always talk well to each other.
This is because the wiring between them is not working well, and that each part is actually working at a different level.
To go into my own backstory, I remember in elementary school, I did really well, and so I think my parents and I thought that I couldn't have ADHD.
But the thing is that I went to a great Catholic school and had teachers that were very attentive and flexible enough to help me hit learning targets but through my own very narrow interests at a particular time.
I was almost always in gifted programs in school and the principal even offered me to skip two grades ahead for middle school which for unrelated reasons my family said no to which I think was the correct decision.
I remember as I got into middle school and then high school I wasn't as gifted as I was in elementary school.
My family's expectation was to get all As, and so I did well in school, taking honors and AP classes, and only had three Bs or something for all of high school.
But the only reason I could pull that all off was that I was doing my homework during caffeine-induced all-nighters and compensating by being good at cram studying.
It turns out that knowing how teachers structured tests and just studying those particular things is actually quite a good life skill.
The confusing part about ADHD specifically is that I had the ability to do really well on subjects I was passionate about.
For example, instead of writing papers, I started making iMovies in elementary school, spending dozens of hours going above and beyond.
I remember one time in middle school social studies, I spent some 40 hours making the best video ever about ice skating.
And then when I got to class, I realized that my peers actually only spent like an hour or two on their projects.
And needless to say, I could spend an absurd amount of time getting 100% on certain grades that I liked.
And then I could barely focus even for a single day on classes I wasn't hyper passionate about at any given time.
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