As a person with ADHD I can’t understand how people are able to listen to an audio book while doing something else simultaneously. When I listen to an audio book I need to be in a dark room with no other living creature nearby to distract me, and even then do I find it difficult to listen to an audio book.
As a person with ADHD I can’t understand how people are able to not listen to audio books/podcasts/TV/music while doing something else simultaneously.
Provided, of course, the other thing I’m doing does not require a lot of word/number processing. Often when I do nothing at the same time as I’m listening, I’ll zone out and think about other things instead, because my mind isn’t being effectively engaged.
Having interesting audio while drawing, gif-making, cleaning, walking, showering, playing certain video games etc is how I consume most of my media. It will also keep me from being distracted by outside noises, assuming these noises aren’t loud enough to mess with my auditory processing.
It COULD be however that you simply are not an auditory learner, or that you have particularly bad auditory processing.
I listen to podcasts and music and things when I’m either riding the bus or doing tasks that don’t require my brain to make words: knitting, washing dishes, upgrading my computer, that kind of thing. It keeps my hands busy enough so I can focus on the words I’m hearing.
This doesn’t work when I’m trying to write (even with music – if it has words, I’m not going to be able to focus, and if it doesn’t, I’ll still get lost in the melody from time to time) or otherwise do something that requires the verbal part of my brain to do its thing. Everything turns into noise.
I have to be doing multiple things at once. If there’s a tv on, I’m knitting, cruising Tumblr, or reading, sometimes all at once. If I’m trying to really focus on the tv, I still have to be knitting or I chew my nails to the quick. If I’m walking for exercise, I have to be listening to music or a podcast.
I didn’t really identify the ‘cannot stand boredom because it’s painful’ or the ‘can’t ever be doing nothing’ symptoms of ADHD with myself until I realised that that doesn’t automatically equal frenetic physical activity. It also equals ‘I have seventy tabs open because I want to watch/read ALL of these things, but don’t have the focus now and have to keep scrolling through my dash’. It equals ‘I love this show with every fibre of my being, but I’ll go nuts if my hands aren’t active’. It equals ‘I’m working out and on a beautiful bushwalking track, but if I don’t have a soundtrack I can’t enjoy it’.
knitting in the dark 