Supper Club × Coding with ADHD with Dr. Courtney Tolinski

I sure hope you're hungry.

Oh, I'm starving.

Wash those hands, pull up a chair, and secure that feed bag, because it's time to listen to Scott Talinsky and Wes Bos attempt to use human language to converse with and pick the brains of other developers. I thought there was gonna be food, so buckle up and grab that old handle because this ride is going to get wild.

This is the Syntax supper club.

Welcome to the Syntax Supper Club.

Today, we have a very special we have doctor Courtney Talinski who's going to be talking about ADHD and computer programming, And she's gonna be sharing with us some of her expertise on the topic.

Hey, everybody. Excited to have Courtney on today. This is something we've been talking about for a while and excited to make it happen.

Yeah. Likewise.

I've been definitely trying to get Courtney on since the last time she was on, and I think it's gonna be really great. We got a lot of questions we asked on Twitter, what people's thoughts are, what people wanted to know. So, and we're gonna, sprinkle some of our own questions in there as well. So This supper club is sponsored by 2 amazing companies, LogRocket, which is the session replay app that gives you all kinds of abilities to see what your users are experiencing an app right, which is a API as a service, but it can also be it's open source, so you can host it yourself. It's a really great platform for, your own custom API back end, if you wanted to have a headless back end CMS or anything like that, if you wanna have some place to store your data, AppRite is the perfect place to do that.

Alright.

Courtney, how are you today? How are you doing? I'm good. How are you both? Doing great. For those of you who cannot see us, Courtney and I are are are sharing a microphone here like a Like a duet, so it's it's gonna be kind of fun.

Court, do you want to give some of your background? Who you are, what you do, what's your Specialty, what's your career? What's what's going on? Yeah. Well Language of choice.

Lang yeah. Language of choice.

Well, aside from being your wife, I am a doctor of psychology, so I have a clinical and educational psychology Background, currently, I am doing assessments. So I evaluate kids, teenagers, and young adults. That's, you know, kind of my bread and butter there with, ADHD or for ADHD as well as learning disabilities, autism, mood disorders.

You know, so that's that's kind of my my range, my expertise, that I'm doing currently.

It Seems to me that there is a lot of diagnosed or undiagnosed or there's a lot of people in programming that have ADHD.

And it seems to be a pretty common thing. I don't I don't know if it's it's higher than other any industries. But, Also, sometimes you see prolific programmers, and a lot of them are say, hey. I've I've ADHD and Whatnot. It's very interesting to me, that aspect of it, as well as just like I feel like a lot of developers are kinda like, I'm not Sure. If I have it or not, I I find it hard to focus. I'm kinda all over the place, so I think it'd be interesting to talk about that. We got lots of questions from people coming in as well about Attention span and focus, and, like, we were just talking about how, I have 3 or 4 different things that alerts me when a invite comes up because I've missed meetings before, because I'm kinda scattered all over the place. Right? So I'm one of those people in programming is, like, do do I have ADHD? Right? Like, my my parents tested it me for it when I was a little kid because I was Crazy. But Oh, really? Yeah. Well, then, twice. My mom said, twice, we tried to get you tested for ADHD because you were just not crazy, like, bad, but just High energy, out at 11, all the time, loud, jumping all over the place.

And that has manifested itself in Some good things in my life, like, I'm endlessly curious and jumping into all kinds of projects that are like, right before this episode, I'm trying to convince Scott To replace this under cabinet lighting. I was like, you can do it. You can do it. He said, I probably shouldn't.

I just destroyed our garage door yesterday. I am,

So, yeah, that's it's kinda where we're at, and I'm very interested to talk about this type of stuff. Yeah.

So, Court, people often ask, like, I guess the difference between somebody who has ADHD and somebody who is Maybe just energetic or distracted or just maybe even less organized.

What what is that threshold, and what defines someone as having ADHD?

Yeah. Well, so, I mean, ADHD, Like, anything is a spectrum. Right? Everything is a spectrum.

You learn as as you get into Psychology. And we talk about, like, autism as being a spectrum. Everybody kinda knows that. But all all, like, mental health, struggles are also a spectrum as well. So, ADHD, there's 3 different types.

So the first type is the predominantly Inattentive type. Right. So these are people that we used to say, like, ADD and ADHD, but now it's all under, like, the ADHD umbrella, And there's the 3 different types.

So, with the predominantly inattentive type, you're struggling with Focusing.

You're easily distracted.

You lose your stuff probably every day. You're losing something. It's usually, like, your keys, your phone, like, the essentials that you need every day. How often do I lose my keys? Every day.

Oh, man. You're describing me. My my, like, way of life is just by multiples of literally everything, And then I still lose them. My parents always make fun of me. Like, you can't just keep buying the same thing over and over again. You have to know where you put it.

Right. Right. I know. And even someone that has, like what do you have? A tile? Oh, the the AirTags and everything. Yeah. Still, like, doesn't I have to ping my AirTags every single time I leave the house. Yeah. Yeah.

So those things, You're you're not organized necessarily. Like, I get parents who will tell me, like, they found, like, old cheese in their child's closet, you know, or, like, Just, like, really disgusting things. Like, they're just really their room is a mess. You know? And it usually makes sense to them, the person, but, like, anyone else would look at it would see, like, there's no, like, sense of, order here at all.

You know, so those are big things. You zone out a lot. Yeah. So that that tends to be, like, the inattentive type. The hyperactive impulsive type is what people usually think of with ADHD.

So that's somebody that's always on the go, that's constantly fidgety, that might be, like, prone to interrupting or blurting out, That is impulsive.

Right? Is is acting before they're thinking through what it is that they're doing.

You know, so that kind of summarizes the Hyperactive impulsive type, and then the combined type would mean that you struggle with both.

So to get a diagnosis by a psychologist, There's actually, like, 9 different behaviors, and and you can Google it or, a resource I recommend is chadd, c h a d d. I think it's .com. West, you might wanna check that. If it's .com or .org.

Yeah. It's .com. Oh, it redirects the .org. So both Okay. So, Chad, that works. Yeah. Told Chad. It stands for children and adults with a d ADHD, Chad. But, anyway, there's 9 different, like, criteria.

And to get a diagnosis, you have to show That you struggle with at least 6 of these things pretty much every day.

You know? So to a point where it's, like, affecting your work Or, you know, for me, like, I'm always looking at kids in school, so it's affecting you at school. So you can think about what you were like, as a high schooler, middle schooler, and then socially as well. Like, it might affect you too, when you're talking with your friends or with adults and You're constantly interrupting them. I'm looking at you, Scott. Yeah. Or Yeah.

They're flirting out, and people get annoyed with you, or you're not, like, totally listening to them.

But so, anyway, to get a diagnosis to meet the threshold, you have to struggle with at least 6 of these pretty much every day, And it has to, like, have some sort of impact on your work or, social life.

So is that the the threshold? I I know, like, Some people in the in some spaces, you you know, will say, well, that's just being kids. You know, that's just big. Kids are all crazy or all hyperactive or all, messy or whatever.

I I know we're not talking about kids here specifically, but, like, what is that that this that distinction is that it has to interrupt your every single day

With all of those things? Or Yeah. It's not, like, all day every day, but it it has to be, like, to a degree where you are, like, Standing out is needing more support.

For kids, that's, like, more support from their parents to, like, model how to stay organized or from teachers, you know, Keeping redirecting the child, keeping them on track.

And for adults, it would be the same thing.

Maybe needing to rely on more supports like Your 5 different calendars, Wes, that you're talking about are, like, with Scott with all of your tiles and Yeah. And all of that.

To do apps. Right. Yeah. So just needing more support.

But what's interesting about adults is, I mean, you've had this whole lifetime of experience, And your executive functioning like, your frontal lobe, your prefrontal cortex, which is in the front of your brain, I'm, like, pointing to it. Yeah. We We do that all the time. Yeah. We're always pointing at stuff. Oh, are you? Oh, yeah. As if people can see. Yeah. Yeah.

But so, anyway, that that part of your brain doesn't fully develop until you're 25.

And usually for people with ADHD, it's kind of, like, delayed a little bit.

And you'll see, like, kids in particular struggle with, Like, the impulsivity or sometimes they have, like, emotion dysregulation where you kind of go from, like, 0 to 60 really quickly. Like, you get really angry really The asked are really, upset really quickly, and and you're not, like, slowing down to, like, use calming or coping strategies to help yourself. So that's, like, just a component of ADHD.

But, anyway, that that part of your brain doesn't fully develop until you're 25, sometimes 27, you know, with that kind of 2 year delay for ADHD.

But adults, by the time you're you've reached that point, you've learned different strategies to compensate for all these things that you struggled with throughout middle and high school, and in particular, smart adults as well.

Really, they their brain find ways to finds ways to compensate for their challenges, so it's not As easy to, observe or to see.

Interesting. What about people who work In, like, an office environment or computer environment, are there specific things that you see, that stand out for adults? Like, I guess one of them could be, like, calendars and actually, like, getting to meetings on time. You know? Is there anything else? Yeah. Definitely.

Yeah. Well and so another component of ADHD and I was talking to Scott yesterday about this. Like, what people don't understand about ADHD is is not so much that you can't Focus, but it's that you can't regulate your attention appropriately.

Right? So one of the hallmarks that I didn't mention of the inattentive type is Avoiding or disliking difficult or boring work, you know, so you're procrastinating, essentially, if you don't wanna do something.

But on the same you know, at the opposite end of the spectrum, you might hyperfocus or, like, get overly involved in something that you're really into. You know, something that you're passionate about or is, like, really engaging to you. And for kids, it's usually like video games, But for adults and especially, like, computer programmers, it's probably like a project that you're working on or, you know, just whatever it is that you're doing. So What you might see is difficulties pulling yourself away from a project that you're, like, really into but isn't Necessarily your number one priority for that day, and having a hard time transitioning or, like, shifting between your work Responsibilities of, like, what you really wanna do and what's motivating to you versus, like, what you logistically need to get done for that day. So that's a big one, I think, that we see with adults. And then, you know, things for you. I see, like, Scott always has, like, 30 tabs open. I think you've gotten better at that, but, like, You know, struggling to to focus on the thing that you're supposed to be working on and shifting between, like, Twitter or,

You know, Instagram, whatever alerts are popping up or, like, just going back and forth between your different tabs. Yeah. Here it's be a problem. I haven't gotten necessarily better at managing my What I've gotten is the a browser that automatically closes my tabs that are older than 20 days old or something. 20 days? You can you can set it up to be you can set it up The close them at the end of every day, but I use the Arc Browser. We had those folks on and, yeah, yeah, the browser act well, like, if you if you don't open a tab, if you don't check-in on it, it will close it after a certain amount of time. But, also, here's some other things I do that you might find interesting, Courtney, that, you know, when I'm like, When I'm programming, I'll be like, alright. Time to work on the header. There's a little CSS issue in the header, and I start working on the header. And then I see, Oh, I got an error into this subcomponent of the header. Let me just take care of that really quick. I'm in the subcomponent. And then I see, oh, wait. There's Maybe something in the state that's connected. Let me just go. And it's like next thing you know, I've forgotten that initial thing that I was even working on, and I've gone down 8 rabbit holes. And I've poked out The other end of the application, I've dug all the way through the earth and and had to take a step back and say, oh, wait wait a second here. What was I Actually doing in the 1st place.

Not that I like, I you feel like the thing for me is that I feel like I'm always being productive. Like, I feel like I'm getting stuff done because I am getting stuff done, But I'm not necessarily doing so in a, you know, structured manner. This, then that, then that, then that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example of hyper focusing.

Yeah. Right? Getting, like, down all those different rabbit holes, and having a hard time, like, pulling yourself away or or even being self aware that you're in that mental state of, you know, an hour's gone by and you kinda, like, wasted that time doing something That wasn't, you know, super productive.

Yeah. That that's very much. Yeah. What what about,

trouble with planning? Because some days I can sit down and be like, I don't feel like planning it out, and then I just, like, sit down and just, like, one thing leads to another. And before you know it, I'm doing something I had no Concept of even touching for the next 2 months. You know? Like, oh, I'm gonna redo my entire website. You know? Is is that Right. Something you see?

Yeah. That's that's the, like, avoiding or disliking, like, difficult or boring things that speaks to that, like, check mark for the symptom, and being, like, easily distracted.

Right?

Do you like planning, Wes? No. Absolutely not. My Caitlin will always come to me and say, hey. Like, like, it's Monday. Like, this weekend, do you on Saturday morning, we're gonna do this. And then I my my saying with her is always, don't box me in. Like, I'm a I'm a stallion, and I need to be able to run free.

You know? Like, I need to I wanna do like and she's like, no. We have kids. Like, we have to do this. I'm like, okay. Like, yeah, we can we can plan this type of stuff. But my ideal day would just be like, I I don't know. Let's figure it out. Let's just kinda get let's just wing it. And Yeah. I wanna do what I wanna do, and, like, I'm taking the kids with me and and whatever. But, like, that's That's not a good way to approach it. Right? No. Yeah. Definitely not with kids, but that that sounds very similar to our situation over here, and it's very frustrating. Yeah. Could you

You'd maybe describe a little bit of my plumbing skills are, yeah. You married some stallions.

Yep. I guess. Yeah. Lucky us.

The big thing with ADHD is structuring your day, and you and Scott have learned because I listened to your productivity episode. And anyone that struggles with ADHD, I recommend you go back and listen to that one. I know it was Pretty recent. You'll have to put in the notes what number it was.

I thought that was really great, but it's understanding, like, Yeah. I don't I don't wanna do this. It's not fun, but it's essential for me, you know, to have a productive work week. And so carving out Time and and making it an appointment like you would a doctor's appointment Yeah. Is what we always tell people. Like, I can't miss this appointment or or when you exercise or whatever. This is a part of my day that I need to do, and I need to block out my calendar. And, you know, however that makes sense if you do it Sunday night or Monday morning, whatever, but making it a priority and not letting it party and not letting it run away.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Having those things scheduled, I think. Like,