“Just make it meaningful.”
“Gamify the task.”
“Set a deadline.”
If you live with ADHD, you’ve heard it all before. And if you’ve tried these strategies, you’ve likely found that they often fizzle out just when you need them most.
A recent study by Orban et al. (2025) backs up what many of us have lived: people with ADHD traits are significantly more prone to boredom than their peers. Not just mildly restless, but deeply disengaged — to the point that boredom becomes a barrier to functioning in academic, work, and personal domains.
And it’s not because we’re lazy, entitled, or unwilling to try.
What the Science Says (And Doesn’t Say)
Orban’s team measured boredom proneness in young adults with and without ADHD traits. The difference was stark: those with ADHD traits scored significantly higher on boredom, with large effect sizes. They also underperformed on attention control and working memory tasks — executive functions often blamed for our inability to “just push through.”
But here’s the twist: those cognitive deficits explained only a small part of the boredom gap.
So if it’s not just attention control or working memory at play, what else is going on?
The Complexity Beneath Boredom
One reason ADHD boredom is so challenging is that it’s not uniform. It’s contextual — and often paradoxical:
- Interest can be high… until it suddenly isn’t. We start strong, then crash. This isn’t lack of discipline — it’s novelty decay. Once the brain’s initial dopamine spike wears off, the task becomes invisible to motivation systems.
- Hyperfocus throws a wrench in the narrative. We can stay absorbed in something for hours — even days — as long as it remains intrinsically rewarding. But this “stickiness” isn’t under conscious control.
- Our focus tends to be broad, not narrow. While autism may involve deep focus on a single topic (monotropism), ADHD often expresses as category-level obsession. I can stay obsessed with ADHD as a field, but lose interest in specific sub-tasks as soon as they stop offering new stimulation.
Why the “Standard Advice” Falls Flat
You’ll often be told to:
- Gamify the task. But for those of us who don’t respond to competition or fake incentives, this feels contrived — and the brain knows it.
- Set a deadline. Artificial deadlines rarely carry weight unless there’s a real-world stake.
- Break it into small steps. Great — until we get bored halfway through those steps too.
When these tools don’t work, the implication is that we’re not trying hard enough. But in reality, our brain is parsing reward, urgency, and meaning in a fundamentally different way.
A New Way to Understand (and Intervene)
What if we treated boredom not as a flaw, but as a dashboard light — a sign that something in the task environment has gone missing?
Here’s a reframe:
Boredom is the signal, not the failure.
Instead of trying to beat boredom into submission, we can work with it by using specific activation levers — tailored not to general productivity advice, but to the ADHD nervous system.
The common thread? Authenticity. Not rewards made up to feel like a game — but real meaning, real stakes, real people, and real outcomes.
Why It Matters
When boredom is misdiagnosed as laziness or lack of grit, people with ADHD are left internalising failure for something structural, not moral.
We don’t struggle because we don’t care. We struggle because we care enough to try — and watch our motivation vanish halfway through.
By treating boredom as a systemic challenge and not a character flaw, we open up space for interventions that respect our neurology, not fight it.
And by moving beyond the tropes of gamification and hustle, we create room for new scaffolding — designed not to force performance, but to support it when motivation falls away.
Final Thought
You can’t punish your way out of boredom.
But you can design your way around it — by noticing the signal, shifting the levers, and refusing the lie that this is all just about willpower.
