I Had An Amazing Biology Teacher Who We All Assumed Was A Failed Scientists.

i'm a biology student. i'd take the animals please

i want. a cicada on one arm and a crayfish on the other

This is so true. I had a REALLY bad phone addiction & was unable to watch TV at all. Now i can watch multiple 45 min star trek episodes (they're low stimulation to me) in a row without it feeling boring or exhausting. We have to train our brains.

Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

dead

I work in an organic synthesis lab, so pretty fucking bad when it comes to the amount of different toxic chemicals. My guess is we have +3000 bottles / containers in our department alone, but nobody knows the exact number.

From what I can tell through a bit of detective work, the chemicals have not been properly checked for at least a DECADE.

I wish I was making this up. I was hired to fix things and I'm trying, but today scared the crap out of me.

I found in no particular order:

- Hydrofluoric acid. Improperly marked and stored for ?? Years and unknown percent solution. It had turned green. We do not own the antidote.

- 5L 40% hydrogen peroxide. Unknown age but guessing at least 10 years. I had to open it to ensure no pressure built up 🙃

- a cabinet full of solvents that have been there for a minimum of 8 years. Includes at least 2 peroxide forming liquids and it's unclear whether they are stabilised.

For those who don't do chemistry these 3 are respectively: death upon skin contact, explosive risk and bad explosive risk with cancer bonus.

I have retreated to my office for a break to contemplate what the fuck to do about all this.

And now for something completely different.

This is the ADHD Teapot. I made it in a ceramics class a few years ago. I use it to explain executive dysfunction to people who haven’t come across the term before (and those who think of ADHD mostly as Hyperactive Eight Year Old Boy Syndrome).

So, most people’s brains are like a regular shaped teapot with a single spout. Let’s say that your time, energy, focus etc is the liquid you have in the teapot. Your executive function is the spout, that directs the tea into the specific cup you want to fill-aka the task that you’re meant to be doing. Spills happen occasionally, but generally most of the tea goes in the right cup.

If you have executive dysfunction, (a symptom of ADHD, trauma, autism, schizophrenia etc.) you have multiple spouts going in different directions. You can try pointing one of them at your chosen cup and you will probably get some liquid in there, perhaps you will even fill it right up (finish the task). But meanwhile, tea is also pouring out of several other places and not going where you want it. If you have another container nearby, perhaps some of it will end up in there. But quite a lot of it is going to end up on the floor and accomplish nothing.

And at the end of the day you’ll have filled one or two cups ( or sometimes not even one) compared to the five or six that somebody with the same sized teapot (but only one spout) has filled, and everyone wonders why you’re so bad at getting tea poured, and why you make such a mess in the process.

One day I’d like to spend more time learning pottery and create a really technically good fucked up little adhd teapot. But that’s a long way off since i currently live in the outback and the nearest pottery workshop is some 400km away. But I figure that for now, it might be a useful or interesting metaphor to somebody even in its rough draft form.

This post is the cup I filled instead of cleaning my house btw.

Being autistic and also a Hyperpop/breakcore/ect enjoyer is really funny bc the sounds of being outside in the real world are often so tiring to me but if I wanna unwind and have a good time I will listen to the the most unnatural noises conjured up by evil computers and specifically designed to make your head explode. awesome