I may have ADHD, I never went for a diagnosis and found body doubling useful at times, especially when I was in school some decades ago, back then I had no name for it. However, I find white noise very helpful with staying on the task and with increased focus. My company moved, about a year ago, into a very cramped office that is also extremely noisy. This exasperated me, I would get drained of energy in a couple of hours and my focus was being severy affected. I even considered quitting and looking for something else. As a last resort I started listening to white noise. I’ve been using white noise (white+brown+pink) for about a year now and find that it helps not only with cancelling out the noise but with focus and staying on task in general. I even use it at home at times. I know this may not be useful for everybody but I’m sure it could help out some of you. I use https://noises.online/ and mix all the types of white noise at the same time for maximim coverage but any type of white noise generator would do. To me it feels like being close to a waterfall. At first my ears hurt a bit after a few hours of white noise but got used to it after a while.
Beyond type II bipolar, I don't have a diagnosis for anything psychological but I'm pretty sure I have ADHD with a touch of Asperger's(based mostly on a review of my behaviors over the past 50 years). But yeah I've found "smoothed brown noise" to work wonders.
I also had some success with wearing a snug fitting balaclava. It's odd, but it worked.
Nicotine helped, but I now have NAFLD and nicotine might be a factor in it so I quit.
Modafinil really worked, despite leaving my body feeling drained and sore. I didn't want to keep taking it though.
In my experience, bipolar can be one symptom of larger brain problems.
You end up with symptoms of a lot of different mental disorders that have a different underlying cause than normal for those disorders.
For example, I have a rather severe impairment of executive function. I have a diagnosis of ADHD, but my internal experience doesn’t seem to match what I’ve read about other people with ADHD and none of the first or second line treatments for ADHD work on me.
I also have a significant overlap in the symptoms of autism, but I do not have the internal experience of someone who is autistic.
I developed some significant executive functioning issues over the past 15 years. The symptoms started shortly after I started taking bipolar 2 medications.
I suspected that it was from the APs, so I looked for research and found a few papers that showed links between APs and gray matter loss. So, I stopped taking the APs (the side-effects were really bad, anyway), but my mind hasn't really recovered though.
It's extremely frustrating. I have to constantly write 'to do' lists. And, I have to put my thinking down on paper. I used to be able to hold big models in my mind and just code. It's slowed down my productivity probably 70%.
Rather than stream noise over the network, I've generated it locally with either Sox or Chuck. I've since lost the Chuck script, but this is one for Sox:
Unless is a very small company you won't be the only one with this problem and management should do something about if it drains your energy which long-term will cause you health problems.
To help me with my ADHD (diagnosed at 42) I put on some Jungle[A], listen to the repetitive Mountain[B] or even a modern classic like Phillip Glass or Terry Riley[C]. I know it sounds mad, but it gets some body part whipping and just overwhelms any distracting thought I could possibly have.
as an AuDHDer, noise cancellation and white noise are critical for my mental health (at work and elsewhere), but near constant _interruptions_ of my flow state by coworkers in the same physical space causes me almost visceral pain, and has only been amplified to unsustainable levels (for me) from forced RTO. I started fully remote at my current employer, so I communicate effectively and prolifically on async comm channels like slack, but even that can get to distractible levels for me. I recently implemented schedulable “office hours” for folks to access my time, so we’ll see if that helps in either case.
If my current mitigations don’t help, i’ll be forced to file for a wfh exception, but those tend to be denied where i work (fang). I’m already on medications to manage my stressors (of which there are many), so i feel like i’m almost out of options in an RTO world…
This issue is compounded by presenting as neurotypical, as i’m forced to mask when sharing physical space with neurotypicals. this is exhausting on its own, and i’ve found to be largely unavoidable in a large setting via trial and error spanning 20+ years in industry.
AuDHD is almost a full contradictions of needs. I excel with body doubles, but they can’t regularly interact with me without me loosing the current “thread”. I crave novelty, but require structure. It’s a difficult thing to understand, let alone live with…
if my post above resonates with you, i can say from personal experience that inaction and carrying on the status quo (continual masking, enduring the “pain”, etc) inevitably leads to burnout and possible further mental and physical health complications. Please don’t just “tough it out”, you won’t like the end results. It takes a toll on you physically and mentally that can take months or years to recover from (if you ever do)
Not ADHD (as far as I know), but I'm terribly prone to procrastination. I too find white noise helpful - I use and would recommemd an Android app called "A Soft Murmer" which lets you have rain noise and throws in a rumble of thunder etc. from time to time.
I feel the same about being drained with noises.
I use white noise too. But make sure to only use white noise when I want to focus, as it feels like I've conditioned myself to be focused when it's on.
Previously, I had it permanently on and I found the effectiveness dropped
That actually sounds super familiar... I've had a similar experience with noisy work environments just tanking my energy and focus. White noise is such an underrated lifesaver. It's wild how something so simple can create that mental "bubble" where your brain finally chills out enough to focus.
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations.
Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background sound I had on didn't match the task, so I'd look for something else... Overall a bit annoying for some groups of tasks.
I'm experimenting with mixing music with podcasts with extra noise and turning it on and off, but I also made https://stimulantnoi.se/ (with extra reading on psychological basis of the design and link to open source standalone desktop app on https://incentiveassemblage.substack.com/p/why-is-nobody-ser...). It allows for mixing (including uploading additional) sounds into sets and binds switching between those whole sets to media keys for quick access.
Nice job. I played with the industrial set (grouping) and it worked well. The groupings concept looks good. And the intensity adjusting is an interesting concept. I've tried or signed up for a lot of ambient sites over the years, and this one definitely introduces a few concepts I haven't previously seen. Good luck!
For some reason I don't hear anything in Safari on macOS. I tried disabling all of my browser-based content blockers. I see the 'audio playing' icon but I don't hear anything.
Interesting. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed the Human playlist, especially the High setting with those percussive sounds that were quite grating at first. I could easily see myself getting in a productive trance to that. It reminded me of why I like techno, drone, and ambient music. I'm surprised how well BPM Forest worked too. Imo it could use some variety in kicks and longer forest/rain loops.
Thanks for checking it out. It could definitely use larger library of sounds in general.
Ideally, I'd like to allow sharing and storing of presets, but it was simply out of scope for the PoC - the functionality is there in the desktop version btw, but it on the other hand asks users to download an unknown .exe and then share mp3 and json files with each other, putting us firmly in the mid-90s'.
There’s an app/service called Endel which makes music I find helpful for focus too. My family finds it eerily void and dead, like it’s technically music but lacks any soul. I don’t mind; I don’t listen to it for entertainment. It’s like the white noise.
I also like the white/brown/pink noise a lot. I think sometimes I crave a bit more texture and feature in the noise and so I’ll pull up endel, but I get by really well without it a lot of the time too.
1. I hope you're saying your ears hurt from physically wearing headphones, not from volume.
2. Many responses in this thread self-diagnose with many disorders because of the need to wear headphones in an open office environment. Open office environments are like emergency rooms filled with crying babies -- they feel almost intended to distract. This is true of "baseline", "normal", "non-disordered", whatever the codeword of the day is for average humans.
Open offices save employers more money (they hope) in space than they lose in lowered productivity. There's no reason to think your average Joe or Jane can just carry on working in one as efficiently as in a private office.
White noise and similar soundscapes (rain, water…) help me focus much better than pure silence.
Perhaps a predictable sound that drowns all others allows my brain to “shut down” the little part of it that is on edge waiting for noises and distractions.
I actually wrote my diploma theses for 6 month in a very crowded student bar / café . I didn't even suspected such diagnosis, but I guess it is not so much about diagnosis as finding the things that work. A former colleague always had TV series on while working. Brains are sometimes strange. Also now beyond 45, it seems I have to find new things that work for me.
Notifications need to be off if you’re doing focused work, and good managers will not only know this, but support you in it, or even expect you to set this boundary in order to do your best work.
Simplest version is to have agreed upon avenues of escalation, which can be ”if someone doesn’t respond in the timeframe you need, pick up the phone and call them, and if they still don’t respond, pick up the phone and call their boss”.
Then from your end, you just need to make sure your boss is set as a favorite contact or whatever is required for them to be allowed through your do-not-disturb settings.
You can also set other routines like weekly check in meetings with certain groups. Often times people don’t need you right now, but they think blowing you up on slack is the only way to get what they need. By setting aside a couple hours one morning and having several “office hours” style meetings, you give people the comfort of knowing they have a time they can get your attention, and that often cuts down on 50-80% of the ad-hoc interruptions.
I have my notifications for Slack and Outlook turned off. I get a Dock tile badge, and Slack does ping my wrist via smartwatch, but not much else. Most emails I get are not vitally important, nor do most of the things I get on Slack immediately required reading or actionable.
