Ask HN: How do ADHD people cope on here?
I love HN. I check it out basically for hours every day, for the past 5 years or so.
But, HN is utter hell too… it’s worse than my addiction to The Guardian.
I see so many topics I’m interested in, so many cool projects, so I bookmark them. Then I see more and bookmark them too. There’s a never ending number of things I bookmark.
But the constant reality is that I will never ever be able to do all the things in my brain. It’s a severely frustrating and depressing fact I feel faced with every day. A world of highs and disappointment.
But I’m totally addicted because there’s just so much new.
Anyone else with ADHD feel this way or have a healthier outlook about HN?
327 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadIf I was picking it up I'd want a docker or similar so I could just start hacking
This really rings true with me. The excitement of the new project, and then the crushing realisation that I can't trust myself to put in the work to build it. Rinse and repeat.
I have no answers, but to say you're not alone. I do build things, sometimes.
1. I keep a tab open for a few days until I have 200 tabs open. I then bulk save them using OneTab and never look at that either.
2. Things I want to remain in my gaze goes in my bookmark toolbar until it scrolls off the end and is never seen again
3. I occasionally use regular bookmarks and have come to accept the fact that I never look at them (although it does give them a bump in the address bar autocomplete which sometimes helps)
So - all of this is basically a sop and deep down I've just made peace with the fact that I never return to most of these things. I figure if it's important enough I'll just remember it and search for it.
Do I need this? Not sure... One click to stop worrying about it and move on.
I certainly strive to do no cataloguing or sorting of this stuff. That was an early valuable lesson I learned (even before getting diagnosed)
Sometimes having 50 tabs open is a sign that I'm distracted and sometimes it's a sign up being really productive. All I can hope to do is make sure that the needle swings to the latter more often than the former and that I have a good strategy to recover when it doesn't.
I'm a bit neurodivergent myself, although it comes with advantages, it also comes with things that make other parts of life harder. Humans are humans at the end -- not a DSM-5 citation.
But modern media is somewhat designed to be addictive to generate ads and revenue -- endless content and scrolling, links...Im referring to news sites but social media is way way worse...
Acceptance is good advise -- I think each person is capable of adapting and learning to function on a high-level.
I use browser extensions to timegate the time spent in websites that I know hit me in my weak spots and tend to send me into time-wasting sessions that I have nothing to show for. There's Stayfocusd and Leechblock, and probably other alternatives.
This worked for a few years, but it stopped. I tried rectifying that with no consistent success, there's no amount of calendar reminders / pomodoros or external triggers that helped beyond the initial novelty.
I tried medication, currently on Concerta XR 36mg, and it has made a world of difference. It's not a superpower but it does enable me to notice the distraction spirals I can get myself into and I can now break them.
I still have to use the same support systems I used before though. It's not a miracle cure, it just "adds" willpower to my toolbox.
Is it 'worth it'? I.E is your life noticably beter for being medicated for it?
Yes, absolutely.
From reading the ADHDUK subreddit it turns out it takes it down to under 6 weeks. Think I need to call my GP and have a conversation.
The first type I tried happened to be right for me, so I didn't experience any negative effects. I did experiment with dose, though. Getting it right just feels like being more awake, which is how I describe the ability to choose where I hold my focus.
I think this varies highly from person to person. As someone who takes one to two days off a week, when possible, I must say I get some pretty brutal withdrawal side-effects.
None of the side-effects are really dangerous or life-threatening by any means, but they are still somewhat disabling. I've been taking my medication for about 8 years now, and I am starting to feel like the medication:
1. Has drastically diminished it positive returns
2. Is starting to take more away from me than it's giving back
Not sure, what other option I'll move to, but I do not have many of them left since I have tried almost all the various stimulant formulations multiple times minus Desoxyn.
So it looks like theres an initial cost to get going but it takes the wait time down from ~3 years to around 6 weeks. Think I might need to call my GP and get started, I've been putting this off way too long.
and it's kind of a paradox, because I've learned far more from the Internet/educating myself online, to become more self-aware and change my lifestyle drastically, more to the Puritanical side as many mentioned above (but not all the way).
so it's that paradox I struggle with: disconnecting from the internet is healthy for ADD, but the knowledge/hacks/tweaks gained from it has helped far more than medication/therapy ever did.
I think it's of questionable legality here, but if you can get a doctor to prescribe it legally it's well worth looking into.
* After eating I do not feel full. Never. There is a feeling of "my stomach starts to hurt, there is hardly any place left". * I am scared of the dark, I remember all the horror movie snippets I have seen in my life
The side effects still reside today
Benefit:
* After getting off Ritalin, my marks in school dropped by half a grade. Which is not that much, I still ranked best of class.
It was a good decision for my personal development to drop Ritalin.
It's not a super drug that magically fixes everything, it just moves stuff closer into realm of possibility, I sometimes still procrastinate, now with lazer sharp focus into the thing I'm procrastinating with, so it still takes a lot of discipline to begin doing productive things, but once I do I no longer have to continously fight myself to keep at it.
As per side effects, I don't really have any, the only thing I have noticed is that I have to choose the dosage carefully, as it flactuates a lot, some days I can get by on 18mg, some days 36+18 feels as if I haven't taken anything, as I'm told it is very personal and you have to find your rhythm with it.
As a bonus, despite getting enough sleep, I also have been drowsy during the day for as long as I remember and it was always difficult to fight through it (excessive amounts of sugar and energy drinks in my case). Concerta has fixed that instantly.
It switched all those support systems from kinda work and absolutely necessary to kinda necessary and absolutely work.
Just like you don't have to and cannot read every book in your lifespan, you can't read every blog post. Your bookmarks doesn't have to be your todo list.
You might like Pocket or similar. Pocket specifically can sort your bookmarked articles in various ways, including popularity on the service, or just let it sit there knowing you have the possibility.
I always believe that a professional's opinion is better than anything you could find here.
piling up browser tabs like dishes in the sink
(no solutions here)
One of the key features of ADHD is a never-ending list of things to do. Edward M. Hallowell (who wrote "Driven to Distraction") remarks that perhaps it is the most characteristic feature of ADHD.
Previously, browser crashes saved my sanity— killing dozens of open tabs with fascinating articles.
Now I try to let it go. In a Zen/stoic way, knowing that nothing will happen if I don't read something. This list is an illusion, as there are orders of magnitude more exciting stuff on the Internet.
Another approach I use is "write it down". In this sense, I add to bookmarks (here I am a diehard fan of Pinboard), but NOT with the intention of "read it later", but "if I want to find it again, I know where it is". So I have a cake and eat it too - no "wall of links of shame", and no anxiety that I might have lost a life-changing link.
I understand some will find this hard though, and am not suggesting it's a fix if you have ADHD.
File and forget is incredibly effective when you have ADHD. There are just too many things that are "interesting" that you'll never have time to do anything about.
Just write it down (or an equivalent) so your brain can stop worrying about it. You'll find in a few weeks time the things that didn't actually matter are gone.
When I was having anxiety problems it was also an extremely effective way of getting out of the circular thinking loop. Write down all your worries on a new tab in Notepad++. All the worries stopped circulating. When I might occasionally look at that tab in a month or two's time. usually I didn't even care about any of those things anymore. Even though they'd all been thought obsessing distractions a couple of months earlier.
And lists, lists, lists. I'm at my most happiest when every day I create a short-ish to-do list for work and a list for home and throw it away at the start of the next day. I try and keep it below 7-8 things, in reality I often get 3-5 done. I fall out of the habit fairly frequently, and that's often when I start feeling overwhelmed.
Plus exercise, exercise, exercise. If I haven't exercised for more than about 5 days, I start becoming a right asshole who gets anxious about the most ridiculous things.
What gets me mad sometimes is that when I work on something and hit a road block, then I remember I found an article about it a year or so ago and I definitely saved it. I just have no idea how to find it.
I have not looked, but I wonder if there is an indexing tool that would also do an OCR on screenshots, PDFs etc. in the local filesystem and then had some advanced querying.
I have recently started using Zotero, which can create offline copies of saved webpages and papers. You can then search their contents.
Last week I bookmarked Yacy, which is a search engine and which seems to allow you to define your own web index. However, I haven't gotten around to seeing how it really works...
Daily, all links are fetched (as part of a larger web search product I'm working on). I can search this, but mostly i don't bother.
I will soon add semantic search and see if there's any magic to be found in my data exhaust.
Truth is I'm forced to spend my days googling dull problems and reading vaguely interesting articles.
No deep work for me at the moment
That's really the essence of what there is to it, in my opinion and experience at least. But: I only could start doing that when I was in my thirties. Before that my brain just wasn't up for it. Whereas when I now think about many of the things I did back then, especially the clinging to objects/bookmarks, I can fully see how useless and even ridiculous they were. Life is really better when you can just stop caring. Though it is also pretty hard to do. I know still sometimes feel pain about things I intentionally got rid of even though I know if I'd have them I would not actually use them. Goes to show the kind of tricks a brain can play.
could be an ADHD-anonymous meeting slogan. I can definitely commiserate with this notion.
Laughed so hard reading that. I should one day write the browser self destruct count down extension. Crashes as a service You can delay the shut down by describing what you think you are doing. This makes for a wonderful journal worth of stupid most embarrassing shit mixed with lies. Remember to use a strong password.
I currently have it set to 24 hours. It has been game changing for me.
Wha?!
I download every movie and book I can. The more rare the better. I know, deep in my heart, they must be saved from dead torrent links.
Even deeper nestled in the depths of my endlessly deep heart, I know that if there is a disaster, that government agency which tracks all, knows this, and I am on a list.
A list to be saved!
"Grab that guy and his raids", and so on. If nuclear war happens, save the leaders, the scientists, and that damned geek.
Sure, they could break that triple ciphered encryption, even with the custom callback to a helmet + a reading of my tranquil brainwaves, but why risk a bazillion hours of video, text, and OSS source code on that?
Instead, snag me and my stuff they will, plague, zombies, war, etc.
But if I stop collecting, if I stop organizing!? I hear the conversation.
"Who's on the media snag list", but as my name is to be spoken, "Oh.. he stopped downloading" and No!, I am left to burn and die.
How do you stand it?
I wish you abundant storage redundancy.
Writing a summary of whatever I read helps a lot. It's handy to reference it later, it's more searchable, and connecting with whatever I read/watched makes it easier to put it down for now. It's especially useful if I do it while I'm reading/watching, because it helps to focus. Duh :)
A few years ago I wrote a simple bookmarking service for personal use, and I don't know if it's the (barebone) tagging system, or the fact that it's not bound to a particular device or account, but since then the HN-induced FOMO I have when there is an interesting article or discussion is dispelled the moment I save it using that particular service.
It doesn't of course have to be self-made or even self-hosted, but your bookmarking service just need to be trustworthy enough (as in, you know you'll be able to quickly find an article again in the future, even on another device) for the stress-relieving magic to actually happen.
(Disclaimer: I only suspect I have ADHD, I don't have a formal diagnostic)
I literally feel a weight lift off my shoulders when I do this. It's become a joyous event. Though it only takes a few weeks before I have to do it again, it's ok.
I can look up closed tabs in the files, though I've rarely needed to do that.
One day, when I have a bit of time, and a kind soul on HN suggests a docker repo to me that provides a good endpoint for relating/clustering documents, I can put together a way to navigate all these tabs that over time were considered important to me.
Sure, there are websites that do this, but this way, I don't have to worry about being profiled, sites going down, etc.
I can really vouch for this approach, at least for the never-ending list of things I want to do.
I should disclaimer this by stating that I have been diagnosed with ADHD but people around me and myself have been doubting it since. (My doctor has also questioned their judgement on many occations but hasn't backpedaled just yet). What I'm trying to say is YMMV.
On Android, a simple app which helps me tons is Linkbox (find it in F-Droid), its basically a fancy database (+ search) with 3 attributes: Name, URL and Category. I wish it had more attention as I really love it and I find that, even if I don't completely read an item (or even just completely blindly), I add it to the app and its there forever. I've actually come back to ideas on many occasions and never felt that feeling of regret, if anything its actually empowered me!
I deliberately saved myself using the baby as a “mental excuse” to be ok with “clearing my list” completely. I then put therapy at the top of my new list.
Now I have a much more solid handle on my ADHD (which is important when you have a kiddo).
If you, dear reader, have ADHD that presents like mine does, try to find peace in that you'll never ever be bored. Nah, we'll never see all of these wonderful ideas to completion, but the ones that stick are the most important anyways.
That's what I do too and it works well. I've changed the system I use to track the content (currently I'm storing interesting things I may want to read later in Zotero, and some also in Safari's Reading List).
What I like about this is that I can save something for later even if, despite finding it interesting, I either don't have the time or the mental energy to read it now, and also that I have a nearly-endless list of things to go through if I'm ever bored, stuck, etc.
For me it's not so much about the infinite list, because I've always had many thousands of tabs open and surf so much that there's no way I could ever bookmark everything (since the mid-90s).
It's actually about the opportunity cost of distraction and finally work itself. Beyond a certain level of experience and mastery (perhaps 10 years), no job has enough variety to satisfy the ADHD mind. We all become Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad: manning a parking booth that could be fully automated while we secretly plot ways to escape and "get real work done". Which is the central theme of movies like The Matrix.
The only thing that finally brought me out of burnout back to living was to realize that life is both a pointless game and the most sacred thing there is. Meaning that once I turned off my inner monologue completely and finally just observed, I found gratitude for all of creation through non-attachment.
Applied to HN specifically, it might help to step back from the rational and look at it holistically. You and I might be missing out, but the whole world is learning and growing together. We're part of a higher consciousness now, a virtual mind overlaid on us that will transcend us before 20 years is out and we enter the New Age. These are the memoirs of Gaia (insert deity of choice here).
I can also highly recommend a clipboard manager (I use Paste with a high history limit), which is kinda like a second short term memory. The most profound effect this has for me is lowered stress. Once I‘ve committed something to the clipboard, I know that I‘ll be able to recover it. I think that it also makes me more productive.
Also the write it down is so amazing. In meetings and while doing research I keep notes and lists for days, that I may never return to. But it’s active listening and studying even at a (seemingly) slow pace that keeps me going.
I also have a script[1] for cleaning up my Desktop (which gets filled by various files I download). It puts all the contents into a date-named folder, in subfolders based on file extension.
[1] https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/9daa23ae2a7abb472cb2
Thanks for pointing it out!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.havabee.br...
Realistically, most of "news" isn't actually stuff that's happened, but just opinion and speculation. The remaining fraction will reach you if it's important.
I've also found that most of my procrastination is from not knowing what to do next and sort of hopping back and forth between things I think needs to be done, so something like GTD or just a todo.txt-file has been amazing.
If you can go offline and don't read HN or other news on the internet do it. It doesn't matter. Practice ignoring it. Turn off the internet - not forever but long enough every day that you realize in what situation you are in.
Why I'm saying such harsch things?
Because you (and me) are bullshitting ourselves here - we are consuming news, articles and comments and looking for some insights or new information but we can't link it to existing knowledge mostly or get sidetracked and lose control of our own directions, things to do because these are probably dull, difficult or boring and have consequences - so they cause anxiety - and it's easier and mostly automatic behavior to run away from them and just fill your head with random tidbits on here. I'm not saying this site is bad - don't get me wrong - it's just that reading for hours here every day will do you no good and won't improve anything.
What to do instead?
ADHD is all about executive dysfunction and working on improving things there can have a huge impact - medication might help but is no panacea - stress, anxiety, outright fear can also cause this behavior and make it worse (at least for me).
If you are in education or school go offline, go the lab, go to the lectures, meet other poeple in real life and work with them, this helps me a lot - take a pen and paper and work on problem sets or meet with other students - go from reading/consuming to writing/creating - make a shedule and be gently to yourself because you totally ignore it - but exercise getting better at it - exercise itself also helps, so does settings time-limits like stop working on something at a time, pomodoro technique and things like that.
This won't work very well or at all depending how deep you are in the trouble but if you catch yourself drifting away be gentle to yourself and practice taking control again.
Work torwards mastering yourself and what is in front of you, you may think it's not as cool or important but that is probably very likely wrong - do interact offline with real people, solve real problems and don't run away from it - face your shortcomings and failures and learn from them or at least avoid running away from your reality.
You need to learn to be honest with yourself and work torwards tackling realistic work in small pieces for things to improve. Going into writing/creating mode helps and also slows you down and puts real problems in front of you that are worth solving (or ditch the project because you had wrong ideas about that)
And be gentle to yourself it's okay to do gown the rabbit hole once in a while.
Zolpidem (5mg taken in the morning when you are well-rested) apparently does magic - totally nails ADHD. I have never been nearly this alive, present (attentive, mindful), concentrated, non-lazy for the whole day. Better than anything (I have experimented with almost everything in light doses) to enhance my day.
I suspect ADHD has something to do with GABA deficiency/insensitivity.
I also don't drive (at all - this is Ok in the EU). Don't try daytime zolpidem if you do - even the theoretical risk is too much because you are not risking health issues, you are risking death in such a case, also of random innocent people.
Oh, by the way, I probably should have mentioned this for sake of potential reproducibility: I currently am on the daily piracetam + lion's mane + vitamins&minerals stack and I also took royal jelly the days I experimented with zolpidem. Perhaps zolpidem wouldn't cure ADHD and would just make me sleepy if taken alone (the substances mentioned didn't have such an anti-ADHD effect without zolpidem though).
I don't bookmark anything anymore because my browser's autocomplete is so good at finding what I need and lasts like 2 years. If I don't need to retrieve it within that time (and obviously retrieving it will reset that interval), I probably will never need it. And if something is SO important that I want to save it forever then I will have shared it with enough friends that I can search our conversation histories to find things. This almost failed me once because I forgot who I linked one thing to but within a couple days I remembered and linked it to several more people.
I guess in this case for the TRULY important things I should probably bookmark but well YMMV. I haven't had an actual problem with this. And the trust in the system stops me from obsessive record-keeping.
(I guess I should add that I do use some websites' built-in save functions, sometimes, but tbh they're pretty write-only, and I only really click them a couple times as a novelty)
This post was a question about how other people with similar issues manage it. I don't see how you read otherwise.
Then on the phone, remove all apps that allows consumption (social media, games, readers, youtube, even the browser). Debloat it with adb too. Switch off all notification except for your main chat app (like whatsapp) and alarms. If still too distracting, set the screen to monochrome. Do not allow your phone to enter your bedroom & charge in another room.
Same with laptops/tv, keep them out of the bedroom.
For series, movies & games, have a set window per week/month to watch/play, do not endlessly play when Idle. Give your brain something intentional to do.
Avoid pornography as it can hook an adhd brain to the max and destroy your attention span.
Avoid caffeine if you can, drink more water, go bed earlier - it all adds up.
You basically have to change your relationship with the computers/internet and not allow yourself to consume/browse without intent or a clear goal. The internet is basically crack for our brains, so avoid it as much as possible.
Get some physical exercise and/or sunlight, once a day. Something as simple as stretching for 15 minutes makes a huge difference.
Remember that your brain WANTS stuff to do, it will generate an endless stream of crap to do if you don't learn to focus it. The internet is just the easiest way for it keep busy if you don't use it.
"if you don't learn to focus it." this is nonsensical and harmful
I would expect the tolerance build up to negate the positive effects fairly quickly. Most people that need to have their coffee in the morning are NOT more awake than a non-coffee drinker but need the coffee to just reach their normal baseline.
So you would need higher and higher dosages to see any positive effects and at that point you get nasty side-effects like heart racing and insomnia.
People develop tolerance at different rates, and it depends on dose and usage pattern, etc. It's not hard to use caffeine a lot and never develop a strong tolerance. (Probably not true for everyone, And it's a different story if you've already been drinking multiple cups of coffee every day for decades).
There's some really fascinating research on caffeine use out there, highly recommend that rabbit hole for the interested.
> nasty side-effects like heart racing and insomnia
I've been drinking coffee daily for two decades now and haven't ever experienced heart racing, nor insomnia if I limit my consumption to the A.M.
People do process caffeine wildly differently through. I apparently have genes that make me not very sensitive to caffeine at all, but I know this isn't true for everyone.
And you can learn to focus your adhd traits and exploit them.
Using caffeine as part of a routine and the binging youtube for 6 hours, unbounded time is a nightmare, esp if your days are blurred and you do it weeks at a time. You are basically then just shotgunning your mind further.
Hell, I'd even recommend medicating over locking your whole life down and living in fear of your own brain.
I'm probably one of them. And the meds I have tried typically prescribed for ADHD have done more harm than good. Specifically I've tried Ritalin, Adderal and modafinil.
Actually that is not true: modafinil did more good than harm, and the other 2 weren't significantly harmful (because I was smart enough to stop taking them as soon as I noticed they didn't help on net).
But the point is that modafinil didn't help me with the problem we are discussing here. (Modafinil reduces the amount of REM sleep I get, even if I take it in the morning, and my trying modafinil is what caused me to notice that reducing my REM sleep would be a good idea, which motivated me to find a better non-drug way to reduce REM sleep, after which I had no use for modafinil.)
Medicine is a shortcut to that, but as you've already noted, it's a huge undertaking of trial-and-error, and may only amount to a transitory solution. Nonetheless, if it carries you forward even a little, it's a worthwhile endeavor.
I think that that is just how the human motivational system works: there is a set point, and if for example I get hit by a car and lose the use of my legs, my life gets much suckier for a while, but a month or so after I have settled in to being paralyzed (i.e., I have gained enough experience with it to have a practical understanding or knowledge-grounded-in-lived-experience of all the significant new constraints on my life) I will be about as happy or as miserable as I am now.
Would you agree with my theory of the set point?
If so, what I am missing? I don't see anything wrong or irrational about the manner of living described in the original comment that you disagreed with, namely,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34487431
I wholly agree with this, as I've done it myself, but nothing about this requires treating oneself like they are "born in sin". This whole idea of "I'm a broken person so I must live a curtailed life" is lifted straight from Puritan ideals. In fact, a lot of American culture carries the tinge of Puritanism still, as if it's the only solution against the Wests' hedonistic level of distractions.
The reality is that a bit of self-examination can help one monitor the ebb and flow of their attention, and maximize it for effectiveness. Putting guard rails on every corner of your life will likewise limit the positive elements of having a wandering mind. As a good autistic friend of mine put it: "my disability is my superpower". He doesn't hide away in his room out of fear that his poor social skills will offend someone.
The only thing that really works is an unbreakable commitment device, make it so that the only thing you can do in any given situation is the right thing.
My comment is highly presumptive because your comment was extremely stereotypical of people who make light of it, maybe stop using words like 'puritanical' when describing what works for other people. Your impairments might be light to non-existent, doesn't mean mine are.
The routes described prior are extremely puritanical, and if you don't see that, I am sorry that you are stuck wielding such repressive methods. They will be more of a detriment in the long run, as you realize that they do nothing to address your thought patterns. I am speaking from experience, as that doesn't seem to have been made clear.
What works for someone else may not work for you and vice versa, that's okay, it doesn't have to turn into you two being condescending assholes to each other or accusing the other of faking ADHD.
The question was how you personally deal with your ADHD and they answered with what they do personally to deal with their ADHD, stop shitting all over them and talking down to them for being on topic. If you wanna give constructive advice you can do without being a jerk about it.
I'm not saying you have to use commitment devices forever, but it's a great starting point. When one is deep into their faulty harmful behaviors, it's hard to have the mental energy to practice mindfulness and take a step back and exercise any sort of control over one's impulses. Maybe nine of out of ten times you may be successful in practicing mindfulness, but commitment devices[0] help you prevent that 1/10 from blowing your entire day up(or even week), precisely because they don't depend on your mental state at all. They let you precommit and make good decision for your future self when you are in a good state of mind, so you won't completely spiral down when you're in a bad state of mind. It's just another tool in the toolbox for dealing with ADHD.
[0] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Commitment_device
I'm likewise sorry if I came off as dismissive, as that was never my goal. I was more concerned than anything. I am aware that a great deal of people downplay the impact of living with ADHD, and that can cause no end to frustration. This very thing led to me dropping out of college. However, I'd also like my easily-distracted brethren to see how they are empowered by their disability as well, and my goals were more to that end.
The point being, remove all the stuff from your environment that hammers the brain 24/7, become a bit calmer, then use your newly freed minutes for intentional time-bound actions.
The way we all live is not normal to begin with.
These words are what got me finally (after having read the other 7 comments by you in this thread) to understand the reason for your participation in this discussion -- what you are driving at. Thank you.
I would also add to all of this if you have the ability to work in person with your screen visible it may help you to keep on track if you feel pressure of being "caught" slacking. Research "body doubling" multiple approaches to this.
Above might seem extreme but some tricks like this can help you use your other psychological traits as a stick against your adhd trait (because we all know the carrot only lasts temporarily).
and the dopamine/norepinephrine release helps focus/motivation/concentration.
coffee is not for me, a bit too jittery/anxious unless I hit the perfect dose ... but Yerba Mate tea has been a gamechanger.
So I usually try to answer these questions for me:
1. What is the probability I will actually read it?
2. How much benefit is actually contained within the information the article might provide?
3. How much stress will I experience when I realize I am not catching up?
If I am honest on most of the things on HN score rather low on 1+2 but medium on 3. I can make the conscious decision that the trade-off is not worth it for me.
Combine that with a rule that either I will read it now or it's not important enough and usually I can browse through the comments a little bit trying to siphon the gist of an article in a couple minutes and failing that I will just move on.
Apart form that it has also helped is realizing that I absolutely loathe reading any long form articles. Even if I am really interested in the topic, I just cannot concentrate long enough to read any technical long form article that contains any form of 'fluff' in the writing. I started to hate reading these kinds of articles more and more.