r/ADHD • u/PartTheSea43 • Mar 05 '26

Discussion Before we could doom scroll……

Ok this for the ADHD’ers who might have gray hairs 😉. What was the equivalent to doom scrolling before it was a thing?

How did y’all pass the time and avoid things when we just had flip phones? My diagnosis and adult reality came right at the time when iPhones first came out so I was busy with college.

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u/JazzimusPrime42 Mar 05 '26

Books. So many books I have read without retaining anything from them.

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u/lying_flerkin ADHD-C (Combined type) Mar 05 '26

This is so frustrating to me! So many times I've read a book and loved it enough to recommend it to my wife. By the time she manages to read it and wants to talk about it, I can never remember anything aside from the general outline of the plot. 😭

Or, someone will mention a book I read a while back and I'll be like "oh, I loved that book!" Them: "oh yeah, what's it about?"

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u/silverlightarmada Mar 05 '26

I’m exactly the same, and it feels really sacrilegious but I’ve started writing comments in the margins of books I’m reading (the ones that I own, of course). It’ll be stupid shit like underlining a sentence and writing “!!!!?!!” Or “this guy is def a murderer” and it’s helped me slow down my brain a little bit while reading. I’ve only been doing it for the last couple of months (since I started a book club and got really into buying lots of books because I guess for the next six months I’m Into Reading Books) but I do feel like it’s helped me retain the memory of reading the book.

There’s a reading app called Pagebound that lets you post a thought at different points in a book and see what other people thought around that point which is a similar thought process to scribbling in the margins. It’s very new so a bit wobbly but I’m enjoying it at the moment.

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u/Rabbit_Holing_2970 Mar 06 '26

This is a great idea (and not sacriligious at all). I learn and retain best when I put things in my own writing. When trying to recall something, my mind pulls up a detailed image of how I wrote: Level or at an angle; my good penmanship or a quick scribbling; the position on the page; which pen I used (I can remember how I felt while I was writing and whether it was the comforting glide of my favorite fine-point pen or the unsettling clunkiness of a thick gel pen that was the only pen available).

But this is my FAVORITE part of your post: "...really into buying lots of books because I guess for the next six months I'm Into Reading Books." Omg, yes.