If you are in an unsafe environment, it’s important to regularly interrupt what you are doing and scan for threats. With ADHD, I characterize a part of what our brains are doing as Looking for Tigers.

We struggle with prioritization in a modern world not because we don’t perceive priority, but because there are no tigers. We can have a discussion about the relative priority about a group of tasks, but ultimately our brain is operating on a higher level of the priority, ‘Tiger’ vs. ‘Not Tiger’, and therefore all of these items which are Not Tigers are considered to be equally unimportant.

And the thing about tigers is that they are sneaky. Just because you didn’t see one the last time you looked doesn’t mean that there isn’t one there, waiting. If you stop checking after the 100^th time you look and don’t find one, that’s when the tiger gets you. Wouldn’t it be good to have someone with you who will never stop checking? Who even though they know that there’s no tiger, that nothing has changed since the last time they looked, still feel the need to scan the environment just in case?

We get caught infinitely scrolling because it mimics the act of scanning the environment. Even when you know there’s nothing new, when you are scrolling through the same links you saw the last 10 times, when you just keep going back to check the fridge as if a ghost might have moved things around when you weren’t looking. I don’t buy the argument that this has to do with the reward pathway. If we produce less dopamine for a given reward, and the effect of that dopamine fades faster than for others, how would that make us more susceptible to reward-pathway habituation when we find something interesting while scrolling? Certainly no one has gone to the fridge and found a surprise reward on their 17^th check, so why do we all have this pattern? I think it’s the act of scrolling/scanning itself that drives us, not the reward of what we find. After all, not seeing a tiger is no reason to stop looking for them!

And if you did encounter a tiger, wouldn’t it be good if you were with a person predisposed to interruption, who can’t help but drop everything about what they were doing in the face of a higher-priority emergency? Many of us, I think, have had the experience where we feel the most focused and un-symptomatic in moments where we are handling an actual crisis, and we can even fall into structuring our lives around this productivity hack, to the detriment of our health and well-being.