Share

Back when I first came up with my Hunter/Farmer hypothesis and wrote my first books about it in the 1990s, there were only a few drugs available to help out Hunters stuck in Farmer schools or workplaces. It was basically Ritalin and Dexedrine.

Thirty-plus years later the selection is wider, and last Friday it got bigger again.

The FDA approved a drug called centanafadine, which Otsuka will sell under the name Simtriyo, for adults and for kids six and older who weigh at least twenty kilos. What’s fascinating about this new drug is that it’s not a stimulant like most of the other ADHD pharmaceuticals.

The stimulants we’re familiar with — going back to Dr. Bradley’s Miracle Math Pills (Benzedrine) in the 1930s — work by jacking up levels of the brain chemicals norepinephrine and dopamine. Simtriyo picks up those two and adds in serotonin, all three at once, which makes it the first “triple reuptake inhibitor” ever cleared for ADHD.

As you know, I’ve never argued against medication for ADHD, although my critics love to wave my Hunter/Farmer theory around and claim I have. I’ve seen stimulants give people back their careers, their marriages, and in more than a few cases even the overall quality of their lives.

When my son was handed his diagnosis as a boy, the label nearly flattened him. What gave him back his life wasn’t a pill; it was him, Louise, and me figuring out what his brain was actually built to do.

That said, medication was a tool for him for a while, and tools — a hallmark of humanity — are good things to have. In this case, this new drug, I find the serotonin aspect of it the most fascinating.

Growing up as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world can cause psychic wounds and psychological trauma that can lead to everything from irritability to rejection sensitivity to full-on PTSD.

Because many of our most effective (and most controversial) antidepressants (the SSRI or “selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors”) work by increasing serotonin levels in the brain, some clinicians theorize that this new drug may help with that aspect of Hunter-ness along with the other two neurotransmitters that the stimulant drugs effect.

That said, the adult trials suggest this may not quite be a blockbuster when compared to the older drugs for people who actually need pharmaceuticals to function in this Farmer’s world.

In two pivotal studies, the numbers ran from about 0.24 to 0.40 against placebo, which, in plain English, tells us the real effect iss noticeably smaller than what similar studies report for stimulants.

The single most comprehensive evaluation of ADHD treatments ever assembled, an umbrella review pulling from more than two hundred meta-analyses, still puts stimulants at the top of the list for both kids and adults.

The Simtriyo trials ran just six weeks and their findings of improved executive function came from a post hoc analysis, a backward-looking review. The full results haven’t even been presented at a scientific meeting yet, so, for the moment, this should be thought of as a promising new option, not a pharmacological revolution.

And then there’s a word buried in the label that should get a lot more attention than it has in the literature, particularly that written for patients and potential patients.

Half the coverage on Friday described Simtriyo as a nonstimulant, but its manufacturer’s (Otsuka) own prescribing information calls it a “central nervous system stimulant.” It also carries a warning, like most stimulants, about the potential for abuse and misuse. And it won’t actually be available until the DEA schedules it, which is expected later this year.

So, the headlines say one thing but the label says the opposite; this deserves some explanation, but I’m not finding it in articles written for the general public. And because it’s labeled as an abuse-potential-stimulant, odds are it’ll end up having some of the same supply and reluctant-to-prescribe problems as the other stimulants do.

It’s also important to remember that no medication can make you into a Farmer. What it can do, when it works, is quiet the external noise enough that you can point your attention where you decided to point it instead of where the last interesting thing (Squirrel!!!) dragged it.

It’ll be a while before we start getting reports back from people using this new drug, particularly long-term results, so keep track of this.

If you’re a Hunter considering a new option, Simtriyo may end up being a good one, especially for those who’ve had a rough time with traditional stimulants or who’re carrying anxiety alongside everything else.

But the pharmacology was never the part we should have been debating. For decades, we were, instead, getting the story wrong, the one where they tried to tell us that a Hunter’s brain is simply a Farmer’s brain with the wiring damaged.

If this helped you think about it differently, forward it to the Hunter in your life who’s already texted you about Friday’s news, and subscribe here so we can keep reading the fine print together.

The label always tells us more than the headlines do.

Share

Back in the early days of my business career, I discovered that I do my best work in bursts, at odd hours, in (often messy) places I’ve arranged to suit my own brain.

I wrote big chunks of my first book on ADHD at two in the morning, surrounded by what my wife Louise lovingly calls my “piling system.” I loved the quiet and lack of distractions, and by putting things in piles instead of folders I always knew where things were.

I frankly can’t even imagine spending my working life in a fluorescent room with a supervisor walking the aisles and a phone ringing four desks over.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because 2026 has become, according to the media, the year of the great march back to the office. After five years of letting people work from home, companies are now starting to issue five-day-a-week here-instead-of-home mandates.

One workplace consultancy noted this spring that these kinds of office mandates have triggered a surge in accommodation requests that most employers weren’t ready for, and a big share of those requests are coming from neurodivergent workers who’d spent the pandemic figuring out how to thrive at home…and are now being told to show up in the office.

This entire drama is the Hunter and Farmer conflict playing out in real time, although almost nobody is calling it that.

But the open-plan office wasn’t designed for Hunters. It was designed for Farmers, and it was designed by Farmers, the very same way nearly everything in our institutional world has been since agriculture took over about ten thousand years ago and then was replaced by machines and now computers.

A Farmer’s brain is built for sustained, repetitive, low-novelty attention in a fixed location: sit in one spot, do the predictable tasks, ignore any distractions, and then repeat tomorrow for years. That’s not an insult, by the way; it’s an extraordinary and necessary skill that fills the granaries and keeps the lights on.

The office, with its rows of desks and its nine-to-five rhythm and its culture of being seen at your station, could be thought of as, essentially, a climate-controlled wheat field. It rewards the people who can pick bugs off plants, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and find it rewarding.

But look what happens when you drop a Hunter into that field. The Hunter’s brain is a scanning instrument, built to track everything in the environment, to notice the rustle in the grass and the shadow at the edge of the clearing: for most of humanity’s hunter/gatherer history the person who noticed everything was the person who ate dinner and didn’t become some big animal’s dinner.

The brain of a Farmer is wired for a kind of sustained, unvarying attention at a fixed post: put in one spot, go through the predictable motions, put aside any distractions and do it all over again come tomorrow. No insult intended here; it’s an essential talent to keep the lights on and the granaries full.

In its way, the office with its nine-to-five cadence and rows of desks is like a climate-controlled wheat field. There’s a certain reward in being seen at your station or picking bugs off plants for hours on end.

In an open office there’s nothing of value for that radar to fix on, so it fixes on all it: the typing of a colleague, the coffee machine chatter, the door swinging open. By three o’clock the Hunter is exhausted from the effort of filtering, with less to show for it than he’d have after two hours of concentration at his kitchen table.

I’m not alone in this assessment; the workers themselves tell us as much. The Washington Post recently examined the response to these mandates and came across neurodivergent staff who said the home office was the first place they could put their own spin on their environment and energy.

They’d made their own hunting ground. One woman told the Post that she was merely trying to get by in a society not constructed for her. I have heard that, in one form or another, from virtually every Hunter I’ve spoken with in my nearly forty years of listening to them.

There’s a bitter irony here. Many of them were doing fine work from home. The company’s issue was never with the output but with the optics, with control and the old Farmer notion that if a supervisor isn’t looking over your shoulder it isn’t real work. And now we’re rescinding the very tools that allowed Hunters to work in their element because it puts the Farmers running things at ease.

Researchers, however, are cautioning against it; a British study has shown that such rigid return-to-office policies can be a hindrance to disabled or neurodivergent employees and serves only to entrench inequality in the workplace.

Researchers studying these policies are now warning businesses that these strict in-office rules tend to deepen workplace inequality rather than improve performance, and that they hit those people hardest whose brains don’t match the standard mold. One British analysis explicitly discovered that return-to-office mandates can actively disadvantage disabled and neurodivergent staff who’d used working from their homes to manage their distraction and exhaustion.

We finally handed Hunters a tool that let them work like Hunters, the ability to work from home in their own space, and now we’re taking it away because it makes the Farmers in charge uncomfortable.

There are some real positives to having everybody in the office. They include mentoring, the accidental hallway conversation, and the energy of a team solving problems or building things together. For many people, including many Hunters, some of that in-person time produces genuine benefits.

So, the error wasn’t bringing people together but, rather, the one-size-fits-all decree, based on the false assumption that there’s a single correct way for a human brain to be productive and that that way is the Farmer’s way, performed in the Farmer’s environment, on the Farmer’s schedule.

We’ve built an entire economy that increasingly runs on the very traits Hunters are good at. Novelty. Pattern-spotting. Rapid pivots. Comfort with risk and chaos.

About a fifth of adults today describe their own brains as wired differently, according to surveys. And that number is steadily climbing as more people read about things like ADHD and find the language to describe what they’ve always known about themselves but couldn’t put into words.

Corporate leaders, however, often force highly creative problem solvers back into traditional office rows, where their strengths are mistaken for symptoms.Instead, people with ADHD should be able to design their workspace.

Where possible, give them quiet, give them flexibility about hours, judge them on what they catch rather than on how many hours they sat still.

Years ago I told my son, who’d just been handed an ADHD label that nearly crushed him, that he had two choices in a world run by Farmers. He could learn to fake the Farmer behaviors when he absolutely had to, or he could find the corners of the world that actually wanted what his brain did naturally.

What I didn’t know then was that one day technology would carve out a third option, a way to do real work for real companies from a place a Hunter got to design. After the pandemic shock, we just spent five years proving it worked. Now would be a foolish moment to forget.

So if you’re a Hunter staring down a return-to-office mandate this year, know two things.

First, you’re not broken and your exhaustion doesn’t mean failure. Your brain is staying alert because the office offers little meaningful information to process. It’s doing exactly what it evolved to do.

Second, you have more both legal and moral standing to ask for what you need than you might think, and there’s a growing pile of evidence on your side.

If this gave you words for something you’ve been feeling, forward it to the Hunter in your life who’s dreading Monday, and subscribe here so we can keep making the case together. The Farmer’s field isn’t the only place worth working. It never was.

Leave a comment

Read more

Share

When I ran a residential treatment facility for severely abused kids back in the late 1970s, long before I’d ever heard the phrase attention deficit disorder, we had one particular boy who could simply never stop moving. He tapped, rocked, and bounced his knee under the table until the silverware rattled, constantly in motion. And every adult in his life had spent years trying to make him hold still, and every one of them had failed, finally turning to the violence to control him that led him to our place.

One afternoon one of our childcare workers, completely out of patience and ideas, tried something novel, mostly just to get him out of her hair for a little bit. She sent him out to run laps around the house before dinner. He came back flushed, grinning, and — astonishing everybody — for about an hour afterward was the calmest, most focused kid in the house.

None of us could understand why. But we knew for sure that whatever we’d been doing wasn’t working, and that that running circles around the house, of all things, had worked.

I think about that little boy every time a new study comes out confirming what his body already knew (and I later discovered). And lately they’ve been coming out fast.

A sweeping review published late last year found that plain old physical activity produces real, measurable improvements in hyperactivity, impulsivity, and impulse control in people with ADHD. It’s measurable right down to the electrical activity you can read off their brains.

The Child Mind Institute, summarizing the research this spring, reported that as little as a half hour a day of moderate to vigorous exercise can help kids focus and feel better. Not only that, the effect shows up in both the bouncing-off-the-walls type of ADHD and the quiet, dreamy, inattentive type. Move the body, in other words, to settle the mind.

I believe our species has known this since before we even thought about attention deficit disorder. We’ve known both Hunters and Farmers.

A Farmer’s mind and body, for example, are built for a Farmer’s life. Long hours in a fixed posture, bent over the same patch of ground picking off bugs or planting seeds or weeding, the same repetitive motion from sunup to sundown. Stillness and repetitive “boring” work, for a Farmer, isn’t a punishment: it’s the natural shape of their life’s work.

When the Industrial Revolution happened, picking bugs off plants was replaced by putting bolts on screws on an assembly line, but the motion, the type of life, the mindset necessary were all essentially the same.

So, when we built modern schools and offices, we built them around that Farmer’s mind and body, around the assumption that a healthy, well-behaved human can sit in a chair for six or eight hours and that anyone who can’t is somehow suffering from a “deficit” associated with a “disorder.” We even invented a phrase to describe the failure to sit still, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, and called restlessness a symptom.

But the Hunter’s mind and body were never built to sit; they were built to move across a landscape. To walk for miles tracking an animal, to freeze, to sprint, to climb, to crouch in the brush and then explode into action when the prey finally came into view.

Movement isn’t a distraction from the Hunter’s attention: movement is the trigger for a Hunter’s attention that activates his entire system. When you take a body that’s calibrated for motion and pin it to a chair, the engine doesn’t switch off. It idles. Which is why idling, in a Hunter, looks like a tapping foot, a clicking pen, or a kid like me in Second Grade who keeps tipping his chair back until the teacher snaps.

We’ve spent decades trying to medicate and discipline that fidgeting away, when the fidgeting was a Hunter’s brain’s own crude attempt to crank up the level of arousal it needs to reach peak function. The body was self-medicating in the only currency it had: motion.

Movement is the oldest, cleanest, most available form of that endogenous stimulation there is. It’s the rocket fuel we Hunters were issued at birth. The boy running laps wasn’t burning off bad energy; he was generating the very best kind, the alertness and motivation that let his brain finally lock in.

It also helps when the movement is outdoors (although it’s not absolutely necessary).

Study after study has found that exercise outdoors, in green spaces, does more for ADHD than the same exercise done inside. When WebMD rounded up the evidence on the best exercise for ADHD, it reported bluntly that being in nature while a person moves around can reduce hyperactivity symptoms far more than moving indoors.

The researcher Frances Kuo spent years documenting this and found that the greener the setting, the better children with ADHD could focus afterward, to the point where she started describing time outside as “a kind of natural treatment.”

Some of the earliest work on this, out of the University of Illinois, also found that a simple walk in a park left kids with ADHD measurably calmer and more able to concentrate than the same walk for the same distance and time down a city street.

A Farmer might find these results puzzling. Why would the trees matter? Movement is movement, after all. But a Hunter knows the answer in his bones. Of course the green space helps: the green space is home!

The Hunter’s brain was tuned over hundreds of thousands of years to operate in exactly that forest or jungle environment, reading the wind and the light and the edges of the tree line or the savanna, and there’s a deeply felt nervous-system relief that Hunters experience when they’re finally in the landscape they were designed for.

The fluorescent lights in the box of the schoolroom drains the Hunter; the forest restores him. We didn’t evolve in a cubicle, and some deep, ancient part of us has never stopped knowing it.

Of course, exercise isn’t a replacement for medication, and I’d never tell a struggling parent or adult to throw out a prescription if it’s helping. The same researchers who praise movement are clear that for many folks, children and adults, medication works best alongside other supports, not instead of them.

As we all intuit, a Hunter’s life in a Farmer’s world is rarely helped by just one intervention. But movement belongs near the very top of our toolkit, and it’s the one tool that costs nothing, has no side effects worth fearing (it even makes us more healthy!), and was issued to every one of us standard upon birth.

So it’s time to stop fighting the internal Hunter’s engine and start feeding it. If you’ve got a kid who can’t sit through her homework, send her around the block first as fast as possible and watch what happens over the next twenty minutes.

If you’re an adult Hunter who hits a wall every afternoon, the answer might not be another cup of coffee but, instead, a brisk walk, ideally somewhere with grass and sky in it. While the complicated, mind-and-body sports tend to help Hunters the most (the martial arts and the trail runs and the things that make you pay attention while you move), a plain walk in the park is serious medicine too.

The point isn’t to become an athlete but to give a Hunter’s body the thing it’s been asking for all along: movement.

As I described years ago in these pages, my son used to get that wounded look whenever the subject of school came up. What I wish I’d understood back then is that some of what we were treating as a focus problem was actually just as much a body problem.

The fix wasn’t to make him more like a Farmer. It was to let the Hunter run and Louise figured that out when she started encouraging him to skateboard and get active instead of trying to keep him at the table with his homework. Short bursts of homework punctuated by a run down the hill on the board worked like magic.

If this astonishing but intuitive research struck a chord, take it for a walk and think it over, then come back and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next. And forward it to any parent you know who’s been told their kid “just needs to settle down.”

Maybe what that kid needs is to get outside and move like the Hunter he or she is.

Leave a comment

Share

There’s a moment I’ve described before, sitting up in bed at two in the morning sometime around 1990, reading a deadly dull article about the genome of wheat to try to get me back to sleep, when the whole hunter-and-farmer idea came to me in a flash. My son had just been handed an ADHD diagnosis and a story that stole his hope, and I was hunting through everything I could find for a better story to give him.

What hit me that night was the realization that the behaviors we were calling symptoms, the scanning and the impulsivity and the appetite for stimulation, were a perfect description of what a Hunter would need to survive in a forest full of food and danger. I’ve spent more than thirty years since then watching the science slowly, sometimes grudgingly, catch up to that two a.m. thought.

The latest catch-up arrived in December, in the pages of one of the most prestigious journals in the field, and it’s amazing how close it comes to the truth while still managing to point in the wrong direction.

Researchers at Rockefeller University reported that they’d identified a gene, called Homer1, that shapes attention by controlling how noisy the brain is at rest. Mice with lower levels of two particular versions of that gene had quieter brain activity and, the researchers found, sharper focus.

The team was careful and the work was elegant. They mapped a stretch of DNA that, remarkably, explained close to a fifth of the variation in attention they were measuring, which is an enormous effect for a single gene. And they framed the whole thing around a single idea that’s the hinge on which this entire conversation turns.

Attention, they said, comes down to the brain’s ability to separate signal from noise. ADHD, in this telling, is what happens when too much background activity drowns out the things that matter.

And so the exciting possibility they raised is a new kind of medication, one that would calm the brain rather than stimulate it, dialing down the noise so the signal can come through. They even found the mechanism, an increase in the brain’s natural braking system that quieted the idle chatter and let the important cues land cleaner.

Now, I have nothing but respect for that research. It’s genuinely beautiful work, and if it eventually helps people who are suffering, I’ll be the first to cheer. But I want to gently turn the picture around, the way I turned the wheat article around all those years ago, because what the scientists are calling noise, a Hunter would call the whole point.

Picture the forest again. A hunter moving through it cannot afford a quiet brain. He needs the radar wide open, registering every rustle in the leaves, every shift in the light, every snapped twig, because any one of them might be dinner and any one of them might be a predator.

What looks like background noise in a laboratory looks like survival information in the wild. The brain that fires at the faintest stir, the brain that refuses to filter out the periphery, is not a broken brain. It’s a sentinel. It’s the brain that kept our ancestors alive long enough to become our ancestors.

The Hunter’s nervous system is tuned to a low threshold on purpose, set to catch the weak signal that the calmer brain would miss.

So here’s what the Homer1 study actually found, told as a Hunter would tell it.

They located a setting in the brain, a knob, that determines how sensitive your radar is. Turn it one way and you get the watchful, scanning, everything-matters Hunter. Turn it the other way and you get the calmer, narrower, one-thing-at-a-time Farmer.

And then, because the entire enterprise of modern psychiatry was built inside a Farmer’s world and measures success by Farmer’s standards, they looked at the two settings and decided the Farmer’s was the healthy one and the Hunter’s was the disorder to be medicated away!

The drug they’re dreaming of isn’t a cure for a defect. It’s a dial that makes a Hunter’s brain behave like a Farmer’s for a while. Which, you might remember, is exactly how I described Ritalin to my twelve-year-old son. Farmer pills, I called them, and I meant it without contempt. Sometimes you need to act like a Farmer to survive in a Farmer’s institution, and a tool that lets you do that on demand is a real gift.

The trouble is never the tool. The trouble is the story we wrap around the tool.

If you tell a child that scientists have found the gene that makes his brain too loud and that there’s something wrong with him that needs quieting, you’ve handed him the same hopeless story the psychologist handed Justin, just dressed up in newer molecular clothes.

But if you tell him that his brain is set to a sensitive, watchful, ancient setting that was the difference between life and death for a hundred thousand years, and that the modern classroom just happens to be a place with almost nothing worth detecting, you’ve told him something that’s every bit as scientifically true and a thousand times more useful.

Same gene. Same mechanism. Same study. Completely different floor to stand on.

And notice what the research itself quietly admits. The scientists pointed out that the same gene and its partners show up in studies of several different conditions, not just ADHD but autism and schizophrenia too. They found a fundamental dial of human attention, a piece of basic wiring that varies naturally across people.

That’s not the signature of a disease. That’s the signature of diversity, of a species that hedged its bets by producing brains tuned to different settings, some watchful and some steady, because a tribe with both kinds in it survives conditions that would wipe out a tribe with only one. We didn’t all get the same setting because we were never supposed to.

This is the part I’d want any parent reading a scary headline about the ADHD gene to hold onto. Finding the biological mechanism behind a trait tells you how it works, but it tells you nothing at all about whether it’s good or bad, any more than finding the gene for height tells you whether being tall is a blessing or a curse.

That judgment doesn’t come from the laboratory: it comes from the environment you measure the trait against, and from the story the culture decides to tell itself. For a hundred thousand years the environment was the forest, plain, savanna, or jungle and the story was that the watchful one led the hunt. We changed the environment in the blink of an evolutionary eye, and then we changed the story to match, and we’ve been calling our sentinels broken ever since.

I don’t expect the press releases to start describing Homer1 as the gene that gave us our finest Hunters. But you can describe it that way in your own house, to your own kid, because it happens to be the more complete truth. The science keeps confirming the mechanism. What it can’t do, and what’s left to us, is decide what the mechanism means.

If this gave you a sturdier story to stand on, pass it along to someone who needed it, and subscribe to keep these in your inbox. The researchers found the knob. Let’s just be careful about who gets to decide which way is up.

Leave a comment

Share

Louise has a line about me she’s been using for over forty years. She says I don’t have a filing system, I have a piling system.

It’s true, and it’s not going to change. My office has always looked like a paper avalanche froze in mid-collapse, because the part of my brain that should sort and label and put things in their proper folders is the part I got shortchanged on. My one consolation is the picture above, which hangs on my wall.

I can chase an idea across three decades and a dozen books. But ask me to maintain an orderly calendar or remember to file the thing or break a big project into tidy sequential steps, and you’ve found the exact place where my Hunter brain runs out of road. For most of my life, the only fix was to marry a Farmer (did that), hire a Farmer (did that, too), or simply suffer (did a lot of that!).

So you can imagine how I feel watching what’s happening right now, as ADHD adults all over the world discover that they can, for the first time in history, put a Farmer on staff for almost nothing.

I’m talking about the way people with ADHD have started using AI. Not for the diagnosis stuff I wrote about a few weeks back, but as a daily working tool, a kind of tireless assistant that handles the very jobs a Hunter’s brain handles worst.

The neurodivergent corners of the internet have been buzzing about this for a while now, and the more thoughtful write-ups have started calling it what it really is.

One foundation that works with ADHD students and adults described AI not as a productivity gimmick but as external executive-function support, a system that helps stabilize thinking, cut down overwhelm, and actually get a person moving.

That phrase, executive function, is the clinical name for exactly the cluster of skills Hunters tend to struggle with. Planning. Prioritizing. Sequencing. Remembering. Starting the boring task and then, God help us, finishing it.

Think about what that means through the lens we use here. The Hunter is brilliant at the things a hunt requires: scanning, improvising, spotting the pattern nobody else saw, locking into ferocious hyperfocus when the chase is on. What the Hunter is bad at is the Farmer’s work, the patient, orderly, one-step-after-another labor of maintaining a system over time.

And the cruelty of the modern world is that it buries the hunt under mountains of Farmer’s work. To do the exciting thing you love, you first have to schedule it, budget for it, email six people about it, and break it into a project plan.

For a Hunter, that pile of administrative underbrush is often the thing that kills the dream before it starts. Not because the Hunter lacks the talent. Because the Hunter lacks the patience for the paperwork standing between him and the talent.

What AI does, when a Hunter uses it well, is clear the underbrush. The members of one ADHD peer-support community reported using these tools to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, the single move that paralyzes more Hunters than almost anything else.

Adults have described handing the machine a tangle of obligations and getting back a clean schedule, or dumping a chaotic pile of thoughts and getting back a draft they could actually edit.

Writers with ADHD talk about using it to get over the first hurdle, to brainstorm, research, or produce a rough first version so they’re correcting instead of facing the terror of a blank page. The tools that seem to help most, according to people who’ve tested a stack of them this year, are the ones that hold onto context across days so the Hunter doesn’t have to keep everything balanced in a working memory that was never built to hold it.

I’ll be honest, the first time I really understood this I felt something close to grief, the good kind. I thought about my son at twelve, drowning in a school system that judged him on his weakest skills. I thought about the boy at the treatment center who couldn’t sit still. I thought about my own piling system and the assistants and family members who’ve spent years being my external memory out of love.

And it struck me that a kid getting an ADHD diagnosis today is walking into a world where, for the price of next to nothing, he can hand the Farmer’s work to a machine that never sighs, never judges, never makes him feel like a failure for needing to ask the same question twice.

That’s not a small thing. For a lot of Hunters, that’s the difference between a dream that dies in the underbrush and a dream that gets to be hunted.

But you know I won’t sell you hope without honesty, so let me plant a flag here: there’s a difference between hiring a Farmer and becoming dependent on one.

The machine is a magnificent tool for the Farmer’s work, the sorting and sequencing and drafting. But it isn’t a substitute for the Hunter’s judgment, and that’s the part I’d never want anyone to outsource.

The whole gift of the Hunter brain is the leap nobody else would make, the connection nobody else saw, the willingness to chase the strange idea across the clearing.

A machine that’s trained on everything everybody else has already done is, almost by definition, a Farmer. It’s good at the well-trodden path; it’s not the one who finds new country.

So use it to clear your road, by all means, but don’t let it decide where the road goes. Researchers poking at how well these tools actually design support plans have found the output can be coherent and useful but uneven, strong in places and shaky in others, which is exactly what you’d expect from an assistant who’s diligent but doesn’t really understand the hunt.

Check its work. Keep your hand on the wheel. It’s the plow, not the farmer who knows the land, and it is most certainly not you.

There’s an irony in all this that I can’t help savoring. For ten thousand years the Farmers ran the show, and the Hunters had to bend themselves into Farmer shapes just to get by, faking the orderly behaviors, taking the Farmer pills, apologizing for the piles.

Now, suddenly, the Hunters get to keep being Hunters and rent the Farmer skills by the hour. The thing the culture spent centuries shaming us for not having, we can now simply pick up off the shelf, and get back to the work our brains were actually built for. I don’t think we’ve begun to reckon with how much that’s going to unleash.

If you’re a Hunter who’s never tried this, I’d encourage you to start small and start today. Take the one task that’s been sitting on your list for three weeks, the one that’s not hard so much as it’s tedious and shapeless, and ask the machine to break it into the first three steps. Watch what happens when the underbrush clears and the hunt is suddenly right in front of you.

And then come tell me about it, because I want to know. Subscribe here and forward this to the Hunter in your life who’s still trying to do all the Farmer’s work alone. They don’t have to anymore. For the first time in human history, they really don’t.

Share

In 2025, Americans started more new businesses than in any prior year on record. 5.9 million of them, up 8 percent from 2024, in every single month outpacing the year before. That’s on top of 5.4 million in 2023, which was itself the previous record, which was itself part of a 47.8 percent surge above pre-pandemic levels. New business formation has been climbing now for five years straight, while traditional corporate hiring tightens and layoffs accelerate.

If you stop and look at that pattern carefully, something becomes obvious. We’re watching the largest mass shift away from Farmer work in modern American history, and almost nobody is talking about it in those terms.

I’ve been writing about Hunters in a Farmer’s world for thirty-three years, and it’s increasingly clear to me that the biggest validation of the framework isn’t going to come from neuroscience. It’s already coming from the labor market.

Let me lay out what’s happening, and why, and why, if you’ve got Hunter wiring, this is the most important economic moment of your life.

The traditional American Farmer career was a 20th-century invention. You went to school. You learned to sit still, follow directions, and produce predictable output. You graduated and went to work for a large organization that valued the same traits. You stayed there for decades, took the steady paycheck, made gradual upward moves, and retired with a pension.

The job was repetitive, but the structure was stable. Stability was the deal. You traded novelty for security, and most American Farmers thought that was a fair exchange.

That deal is coming apart, and it’s coming apart fast. Corporations are hiring less, restructuring more, and outsourcing the rest to artificial intelligence and gig labor.

The 30-year career at a single company is now a historical curiosity. The pension has been replaced by a 401(k) you have to manage yourself. The implicit promise that hard work and loyalty would be rewarded by long-term security has been broken in plain sight by company after company.

Younger workers can see this clearly. According to a recent Intuit QuickBooks survey of 3,000 American adults, 74 percent of Millennials feel a sense of urgency to start a business in 2026. 43 percent of Gen Z lead in entrepreneurial intent. 47 percent of American adults earned money from a side hustle in the past year, and most of them didn’t even register the business. They’re operating in what economists are starting to call the “invisible entrepreneur” economy.

What does it take to thrive in an economy like this?

Look at the list of skills: Scanning a constantly changing landscape for opportunities. Switching contexts rapidly. Spotting patterns nobody else has noticed. Acting on intuition before all the data is in. Tolerating high uncertainty. Bouncing back from setbacks fast. Working in short, intense bursts of focus on whatever’s hot at the moment. Being willing to abandon a project that isn’t working and pivot to a new one. Maintaining several income streams and several active projects at once.

That isn’t a Farmer’s skill list. That’s a Hunter’s skill list. That is, almost item-for-item, the cognitive profile of an ADHD brain.

The economy is reshaping itself around exactly the kind of nervous system that a hunting band would have valued. And the data on who’s actually starting these millions of businesses suggests that Hunters know it, even if they don’t yet have the language for what they’re feeling.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 report found startup rates at record levels in many regions of the world, with one of its core themes being “from uncertainty to opportunity.” Uncertainty makes Farmers anxious. Uncertainty is the air a Hunter breathes.

And AI is the variable that makes this shift permanent.

For most of the last fifty years, the Farmer’s biggest advantage was the ability to do repetitive, rule-based knowledge work consistently and reliably. Filing. Bookkeeping. Filling out forms. Writing standard reports. Following procedures. That work was the bedrock of middle-class American employment.

AI is now eating it. Every task that involves applying a known procedure to a known input is being automated, sometimes by people working alone with a laptop and a subscription. The Farmer’s traditional zone of competence is being industrialized away, the way handweaving got industrialized away when the power loom showed up.

Meanwhile, the things AI can’t do well are the things Hunters have always done well. Notice that the conversation has shifted. Sense the unspoken concern in the room. Read a market and know that a trend is about to break two weeks before the data shows it. Improvise a solution to a problem nobody has seen before. Keep three different framings of a question in mind at once and switch between them based on context. Take a creative leap that bypasses the obvious answer entirely.

AI doesn’t replace those capacities. AI augments them, in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. Hunters who learn to drive AI as a power tool become some of the most productive workers in human history. Farmers whose only skill was the procedural work AI has now automated face a much harder transition.

A personal note. I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my adult life. I’ve started a number of businesses, written more than three dozen books, hosted a national radio show for over twenty years, and helped build educational alternatives for ADHD kids who needed something other than the Farmer-shaped school system.

None of that came out of careful long-term planning. Almost all of it came out of seeing an opportunity, leaning in fast, learning by doing, and being willing to pivot when something wasn’t working. That’s how Hunter brains build careers. Not in a straight line, but in a series of leaps from one engaged project to the next, each one teaching you something you couldn’t have learned by sitting still.

For most of my life, the conventional wisdom said this was a foolish way to live. Get a real job. Stop bouncing between projects. Pick one thing and stick with it for forty years.

The conventional wisdom was wrong, and it was wrong because it was Farmer wisdom for a Farmer economy that doesn’t exist anymore. In the economy that’s actually arriving, the Farmer’s careful, single-track approach is becoming a liability. The Hunter’s restless, multi-track approach is becoming an enormous strength.

If you’ve got a Hunter brain and you’ve spent your life feeling like you couldn’t fit yourself into the standard career boxes, take this from the data. You don’t need to fit yourself in. The boxes are dissolving.

The economy is opening up exactly the kind of niches your wiring was built for. The 5.9 million Americans who started new businesses in 2025 are the early adopters of a much larger shift that’s just getting started, and a disproportionate number of them are almost certainly operating with the same kind of nervous system you have.

Start the side hustle. Take the freelance gig. Run the experiment. Stack two or three small income streams together and see what they teach you. Use AI to handle the procedural work that bores you, and put your real attention on the parts of your work where you can see things nobody else can see. Treat your shorter attention span as a feature, not a defect. The Farmer economy punished it. The Hunter economy is going to reward it.

The mismatch between Hunter brains and modern life that I’ve been writing about for decades was always a temporary historical accident. We had ten thousand years where Farmer-cognition fit the dominant economic structure. We’re now entering a period where that structure is changing, and the change favors exactly the kind of mind the schools tried to medicate out of you when you were eight years old.

If this resonates, share it with the Hunter you know who’s been quietly running their own experiments without permission. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. The rest of the world is starting to wake up to what we’ve known for a long time. Hunters were never the problem. We were the early indicator of what was coming.

Leave a comment

Share

If you read enough commentary on the rising rate of adult ADHD diagnoses, you’ll see the same story over and over: TikTok made everyone think they have ADHD. Telehealth turned diagnosis into a content category. Pharmaceutical advertising taught a generation to pathologize ordinary distractibility.

The rise in adult diagnoses, this story goes, is essentially a fad.

That story is wrong. Not entirely wrong, but mostly wrong. And it misses what’s actually one of the quietest and most significant cultural shifts of the last decade.

Look at who’s actually getting diagnosed. According to a comprehensive 2026 review of recent research by clinical psychologist Tom Allen, Ph.D., the fastest-growing demographic for new ADHD diagnoses isn’t teenagers scrolling for content. It isn’t twenty-somethings looking for a stimulant prescription. It’s women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Especially women in their 30s and 40s.

These are women who’ve been functioning, often at very high levels, for decades. Women with careers, children, marriages, mortgages. Women who, as one psychiatrist recently described it, are showing up after their own children get diagnosed and quietly recognizing the same patterns in themselves.

Mothers. They’re recognizing themselves in their children. And they’re realizing that the thing they’ve been calling “burnout” or “depression” or “anxiety” or “I’m just bad at executive function” for thirty years has had a name the whole time.

I’ve been watching this for a long time; here’s what’s actually going on, why it isn’t a fad, and why the Hunter/Farmer framework explains it better than anything else.

For most of the history of ADHD as a clinical category, the diagnosis was built around a stereotype. The disruptive boy. The kid who couldn’t sit still. The problem child whose teachers complained loudly enough that someone eventually got him evaluated.

That stereotype excluded the inattentive presentation almost entirely, and the inattentive presentation is statistically far more common in girls and women than the hyperactive one.

So girls grew up with classic Hunter brains, scanning, daydreaming, distractible, intuitive, gifted at lateral thinking, and got told they were “lazy” or “scattered” or “not living up to potential” or “just need to apply yourself.” Boys with the same wiring got a diagnosis and a prescription. Girls got blamed.

Then those girls got older. They went to college. They learned what every smart Hunter girl learns, which is that you can compensate for your wiring through sheer effort, through elaborate external scaffolding, through endless lists and calendars and reminders, through caffeine and adrenaline and the social capital of being the woman who has it all together.

They became experts at what the clinical literature now calls masking. They built a Farmer-shaped exterior over a Hunter brain. The cost of maintaining the exterior was usually exhaustion, anxiety, and a chronic, low-grade sense that something was wrong with them.

That worked, sort of, until life got harder. And life got harder right around the time these women hit their 30s and 40s.

The cognitive load of a job, plus children, plus a household, plus aging parents, plus a marriage, plus the entire emotional infrastructure that women in our culture are still expected to maintain, eventually outpaces the masking capacity of a Hunter brain.

The external scaffold gets too elaborate to hold up. The lists multiply. The forgotten things compound. The performance starts to crack. And the woman in the middle of it, who’s been telling herself for thirty years that she just needs to try harder, finally hits a wall hard enough to ask whether the framework she’s been operating inside has been wrong from the start.

The pandemic accelerated all of this. When kids came home, when work went remote, when the daily structure of school and office disappeared overnight, a lot of women lost the external scaffolding they’d been depending on without realizing they were depending on it. The mask cracked because the world outside the mask collapsed.

A great many women who started seeking telehealth ADHD evaluations during and after COVID weren’t suddenly converted by social media. They were experiencing, for the first time, an environment in which they couldn’t compensate their way through, and the underlying wiring became impossible to ignore.

Then their children got diagnosed.

The genetic heritability of ADHD runs around 74 percent, which is enormous in psychiatric epidemiology. Which means that the parents of ADHD kids are often, themselves, ADHD (and ADHD is frequently diagnosed in adopted kids because their biological parents were sufficiently impulsive to get pregnant).

The pediatrician sits down with mom and dad and explains the symptoms, and somewhere in the conversation mom feels something cold move across her shoulders. Time blindness. Forgetting things mid-sentence. Starting projects with intense enthusiasm and abandoning them halfway through. Feeling like she’s been “performing functioning” her entire life. Diagnosing her son becomes the first time anyone has ever described her own brain accurately.

This is the cultural shift. It isn’t TikTok. It’s two and a half million years of human evolution catching up to a generation of women who were forced to play Farmer for their entire lives, and who are finally encountering language that lets them see what was actually going on.

Now bring in the Hunter/Farmer frame.

The relief these women describe upon diagnosis is exactly the relief my Hunter/Farmer framework predicts. They aren’t lazy. They aren’t broken. They aren’t failing at being good Farmers. They’re simply Hunters. They were always Hunters.

The exhaustion they’ve been carrying for decades wasn’t a moral failing or a character defect. It was the cost of running an exquisitely-tuned scanning, novelty-seeking, pattern-recognizing, fast-context-switching brain inside a life designed for someone whose brain works the opposite way.

Of course they were tired. Of course they felt scattered. Of course they “couldn’t focus.” They were focusing constantly, all day, on the relentless work of pretending to be someone they weren’t.

The diagnosis isn’t pathology. It’s permission. Permission to stop performing. Permission to design a life around how they’re actually built. Permission to recognize that the same traits they’ve been hiding for thirty years are the traits that, in the right context, make them remarkable.

The empathy. The intuition. The ability to read a room in seconds. The pattern recognition that lets them see five steps ahead while everyone else is still stuck on step one. The deep capacity for hyperfocus when something genuinely engages them. The creativity that emerges when they stop trying to suppress the way their mind actually works.

I want to say something to the husbands and partners reading this, because this story affects you too:

If your wife or partner is one of the women in this wave, what she’s going through isn’t a fad and it isn’t a phase. She isn’t borrowing an identity from the internet. She’s recognizing, often after decades of self-blame, that she has a kind of nervous system that was never designed for the life she’s been working so hard to maintain.

The kindest and most useful thing you can do is not to challenge the diagnosis, and not to tell her you’ve never noticed anything unusual, and not to suggest she’s overthinking it. The kindest thing you can do is take it seriously, learn what a Hunter brain actually is, and start asking with her what kind of life would let her wiring be a strength instead of a daily exhaustion.

For the women themselves, the message is simpler. You aren’t late. You aren’t crazy. You aren’t making it up. You’re part of what may be the largest collective awakening of adult Hunters in modern history, and the science is finally catching up to what your body has been telling you since you were eight years old.

If you’ve recognized yourself in this piece, or recognized someone you love, share it with her. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. We’re going to keep telling this story until every Hunter who needs to hear it has.

Leave a comment

Share

A new long-term study published in Pediatrics Open Science tracked 8,324 children for four years, starting at age 9 or 10, and the headlines have been doing what they always do with screen-time research. Screens are bad for kids. ADHD on the rise. Phones to blame. The usual.

What the study actually found is more interesting and a great deal more useful, but you have to read past the headlines to see it.

The researchers, drawing on data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study and reported in detail by ADDitude, looked at three different categories of screen time. Social media. Video games. Television and video. They tracked each one separately, and they tracked changes in ADHD symptoms over those four years.

What they found was that social media use gradually and cumulatively increased symptoms of inattention, but — and this is the fascinating part — video games and television did not. In fact, kids who played video games and watched TV actually showed reduced hyperactivity and impulsivity over the four years.

Wow! The same study that linked social media to worsening attention also linked video games and TV to better symptom regulation. It isn’t screens that are ruining our kids; it’s specifically social media.

Now look at the numbers. By age 13, the kids in the study were averaging two and a half hours a day on social media platforms that legally require users to be at least thirteen years old. Three hours a day on TV and videos. Five hours a day on video games.

The researchers, in characteristically careful academic language, wrote that “these results strengthen the potentially causal link between social media use and changes in inattention symptoms,” and they offered a hypothesis about why:

“Social media platforms often involve constant messaging and notifications, which can disrupt attention and interfere with current activities. Experimental studies have shown that such interruptions, or even the mere presence of a mobile phone nearby without using it, can impair attention and learning.”

A separate study published in Translational Psychiatry, also drawing on the ABCD dataset but using advanced MRI imaging on more than 10,000 children, found something even more concerning.

High screen use — being driven by social media — was associated with reduced cortical thickness and volume in the right putamen, the brain region involved in reward processing and habit formation, plus changes in the prefrontal cortex. The researchers found that smaller cortical volume partially mediated the relationship between screen time and ADHD symptoms. Which is to say, the screens may be reshaping the very brain structures ADHD already tends to make work differently.

Here’s where the Hunter/Farmer framework lets us see something the ADHD deficit model can’t.

A Hunter brain isn’t just generically “distractible.” It’s specifically tuned to scan a complex environment, follow novelty, track variable rewards, and lock onto patterns the moment they emerge. In a forest at dawn, those traits keep you alive.

In a grade-school classroom, they make you the kid who notices the squirrel. And on a phone running Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat, they make you (or your kid) the perfect sucker to help add another billion to Mark Zuckerberg’s money bin.

Social media isn’t accidentally bad for Hunter brains: it was built, with billions of dollars of research and behavioral psychology, to be exactly as compelling as possible to a brain that follows novelty and dopamine.

The infinite scroll is the open savanna with nothing on it but tracks. The variable-reward feed is a foraging environment where you never know whether the next swipe will turn up berries or nothing. The push notifications are a small alarm that something has moved at the edge of your field of view.

Every design choice these platforms have made was selected, A/B tested, and refined to hijack the exact circuitry the Hunter brain has been running for half a million years.

Of course it changes the brain. It’s a slot machine designed by people who understood neurobiology better than most psychiatrists do, aimed at children whose neurobiology was already optimized for tracking the very kind of signals these platforms manufacture artificially.

The contrast with video games is where the picture gets really clear.

Video games involve sustained engagement with a single task, often requiring strategy, real-time decision making, spatial reasoning, and the kind of focused exploration that has more in common with actual hunting than with anything an Instagram feed offers.

A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that cognitively engaging activities like team sports and martial arts significantly improve sustained attention in kids with ADHD. Strategy games that demand the same kind of integrated focus may belong on the same list.

Television, while passive, at least offers continuity. You watch a story. You stay with characters. Your attention isn’t being interrupted every few seconds by a notification engineered to pull it elsewhere.

Social media is in a category by itself. Nothing else children consume looks like this. Nothing else has been so precisely tuned to extract dopamine from a developing nervous system, and nothing else has been so widely deployed to populations that didn’t ask for it and weren’t equipped to refuse it.

A personal note. I’ve lived through every major shift in American media of the last sixty years. Broadcast television. Cable. Talk radio, which has been much of my professional life. The early internet. Email. Smartphones. Streaming. I used to run forums on the first social media company, CompuServe, back in the 1980s and early 1990s; we didn’t use algorithms or any of the attention-holding tools today’s social media uses to addict us and our kids.

I’ve watched media absorb more and more of the average person’s attention, and I’ve watched my own attention adjust in response. None of those earlier shifts, though, felt like today’s social media shift.

The earlier ones were noisy. Demanding, sometimes. Distracting, often. But they didn’t seem designed, the way the platforms my grandchildren are growing up with seem designed, to attach themselves to the deepest motivational circuitry in the human brain and stay there. We didn’t have to work to stop watching the evening news, but we do have to work to stop scrolling.

For Hunter brains, that work is even harder. The research is finally catching up to what every parent of an ADHD teenager already knew. The phone in their pocket isn’t a neutral tool. It’s a precisely tuned exploit of the very wiring that made our ancestors successful, and it’s running twenty-four hours a day on a developing brain that doesn’t yet have the prefrontal capacity to resist it.

What do we do about it?

I’m not in the business of telling people to ban screens. The data shows that not all screens are the problem, and it shows that the same Hunter brain that’s vulnerable to social media is also the brain that benefits from real engagement with strategy games, real-world physical challenges, and real social and physical environments. The intervention isn’t deprivation: it’s redirection.

A Hunter kid needs novelty, variable reward, complex pattern recognition, and engagement with a stimulating environment. Social media offers a counterfeit version of all of that, optimized to keep the kid swiping but never satisfied.

The real version is available in martial arts dojos, on chess boards, on hiking trails, in workshops where you build something with your hands, in conversations with adults who treat the kid like an intelligent person, in real friendships that involve actually being in the same room.

The Hunter brain wants to be hunting. Give it something real to hunt, and it has less appetite for the synthetic version.

If you’re a parent reading this, you don’t need to throw your kid’s phone in the river, although honestly, for some kids that wouldn’t be the worst move. What you do need is to make sure the rest of the kid’s life is rich enough that the synthetic dopamine economy isn’t the only place his Hunter wiring can find what it needs. Build the alternative, and the phone gets less interesting on its own.

Same goes for the adult Hunters reading this. If you’ve been losing hours a day to a feed that leaves you drained instead of nourished, the question isn’t whether you have willpower. The question is what your Hunter brain is actually seeking, and whether you’ve built enough of the real thing into your life to have something better to do.

If this resonates, share it with the parent or the Hunter in your life who needs to hear it. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. The science is finally catching up to what we’ve been saying about Hunter wiring for decades, and the practical implications keep getting clearer.

Leave a comment

Share

A new paper out of the University of Sydney, published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry on January 19th of this year, just made an argument the academic establishment couldn’t have stomached three decades ago. The authors, Jesse Ruse and Paul Rhodes at Sydney’s Mind and Brain Centre, propose what they call a cultural ecosocial niche theory of adult ADHD.

Their thesis, in plain language, is that ADHD symptoms emerge at the intersection of a particular kind of brain and a particular kind of social and cultural environment, not from the brain alone.

I read the abstract and laughed out loud. I’ve been making that argument since 1993! But I’m grateful for the academic translation, because every fresh piece of peer-reviewed validation makes it that much harder for the deficit-model establishment to keep insisting ADHD lives entirely inside a defective brain.

Let me walk you through what they did and why it matters.

Ruse and Rhodes ran in-depth interviews with Australian women who had recently been diagnosed with adult ADHD, using a methodology called photo-voice that asks participants to document their own daily lives through images and discussion. What the researchers found, in their own words, was that ADHD symptoms in these women “fluctuated markedly across different social interactions.”

Same brain. Same neurobiology. Different context, different presentation. Which is to say, the symptoms weren’t a fixed biological signature radiating outward from a broken brain. They were a dynamic interplay between the woman’s nervous system and the situations she found herself in.

Now here’s the part that should warm the heart of every adult Hunter reading this.

The women in the study weren’t passive recipients of their environment. They were actively building it. Ruse and Rhodes describe how each participant had constructed what they call “cultural ecosocial niches” where her traits achieved a functional fit with her social and cultural context.

Some had found their fit at the macro-cultural level, adopting the broader neurodiversity framework and finding community with people who shared their wiring. Others had found theirs in micro-social occupational niches, gravitating toward fast-paced jobs where their cognitive style stopped being a liability and became a competitive advantage.

Each woman, in her own way, had quietly engineered a life where the parts of her that traditional psychiatry called symptoms became the parts of her that her chosen environment called talent.

If you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, you recognize this immediately. It’s the Hunter/Farmer framework expressed in the lived experience of actual women.

It’s what I’ve been telling my readers, my radio audience, and three generations of parents to do since I first published the book in 1993. Stop trying to force the Hunter to be a Farmer. Build a life where the Hunter wiring works for you instead of against you. Go find the work, the people, the communities, the rhythms that fit how you’re built. The new science out of Sydney didn’t just validate the framework. It documented adults doing it in real time.

There’s something else in the Sydney paper that I want to draw out, because it has a quality I find moving. The authors describe these niches as being sustained by what they call “reinforcing feedback loops.”

In plain English, this means once a Hunter finds the right environment, the environment starts confirming and strengthening the traits that brought her there in the first place. The fast-paced job rewards her quick thinking, which makes her trust her quick thinking more, which makes her better at her job, which makes the job more rewarding, and around it goes.

The same applies to community. A Hunter who finds her people stops thinking of herself as broken, which lets her show up more fully, which deepens the connections, which reinforces the new identity.

This is the upward spiral I’ve watched Hunters climb my entire adult life. Diagnosis can begin it. So can finding the right partner, the right work, the right town, the right church, the right hobby, the right friendship. The mechanism turns out to be the same.

You stop asking “what’s wrong with me” and start asking “where do I fit.” Once you answer that question honestly, the rest of your life begins to organize itself around the answer.

Now zoom out, because the Sydney paper is part of a bigger pattern that’s been building for the last few years.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge launched a project called Attention Profiles in Hunter-Gatherer Societies, studying the BaYaka community in the Congo, asking whether the traits we pathologize in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic) societies might serve different functions in non-WEIRD ones.

Researchers at Penn ran a berry-picking experiment and found that participants with self-reported ADHD symptoms gathered more food more efficiently than the controls.

A genomic study using Neanderthal and ancient Homo sapiens DNA found that ADHD-associated alleles were more common in older samples and decreased steadily over the agricultural transition, which is exactly what you’d predict if those traits offered a survival advantage in pre-agricultural ecology and a survival disadvantage once we settled down.

Now Sydney adds qualitative human research showing that adult Hunters actively construct niches where their wiring becomes a strength.

Different methods. Different disciplines. Different continents. And they all produced the same underlying picture.

A small personal story. When I started talking publicly about the Hunter/Farmer hypothesis in the early 1990s, the response from much of the psychiatric establishment was openly hostile. I was called a crank. I was accused of romanticizing a medical disorder, of misleading parents, of giving people “false hope” and permission to avoid treatment.

My motives got questioned, my credentials ridiculed, my framework dismissed as folk theory dressed up in evolutionary clothing. I kept writing and speaking anyway, though, because the parents and adults I was hearing from kept telling me the framework was the first thing that had ever made sense of their lives.

Three decades later, I’m watching peer-reviewed papers in respected journals come to the same conclusions, often without any apparent awareness that the framework already exists in the public conversation and has since 1993. The academy moves slowly. But it does move. And the direction it’s moving is unmistakable.

If you’re an adult Hunter who hasn’t yet built your niche, take this from the Sydney research: you don’t need to wait for permission. You don’t need a diagnosis to start. The women in that study were building their lives before anyone gave them the official label. What they were doing, you can do.

Notice where in your life your wiring feels like a gift instead of a burden. Notice the people, the work, the places, the rhythms that bring out the best of you. Move toward those. Move away from the contexts that punish how you’re built. Trust the upward spiral when you feel it start.

That’s not “folk wisdom” or “just so stories” anymore. It’s published, peer-reviewed science out of one of Australia’s top research universities. We Hunters don’t need to apologize for who we are. We need to build the lives we were always meant to live.

If this piece resonates, share it with the Hunter you know who’s still trying to live as a Farmer. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. Thirty-three years in, the academy is finally catching up, and we’ve got plenty more ground to cover together.

Leave a comment

Share

Four years in, with no end in sight, the U.S. stimulant shortage has become one of the strangest, longest-running, and most quietly destabilizing public health stories of our time.

It started in October 2022 with a labor problem at a single Teva plant. It’s now stretched well into 2026, pulling in nearly every major manufacturer, every dosage strength, both the amphetamine and methylphenidate families, and an estimated 15.5 million American adults with ADHD diagnoses, more than seventy percent of whom reported difficulty filling their prescriptions during the worst stretches.

I’ve been hearing from readers for years now. The same story over and over. Five pharmacies, nobody has it. Switched from Adderall to Vyvanse, switched from Vyvanse to Concerta, switched from Concerta to compounding, switched again.

Phone trees. Insurance denials. Going without for weeks. Anxiety about the next refill bleeding into anxiety about everything else. The system is failing them, and it’s been failing them for so long now that “failing” doesn’t quite capture it. It’s the new normal.

A new analysis published in JAMA Health Forum and reported by CIDRAP last month traces the structural roots of the shortage further than most reporting has gone. It isn’t really about over-prescribing. And it isn’t really about telehealth expansion, despite what the DEA likes to imply.

It’s really about how fragile our pharmaceutical supply chain has become, and how rigidly the federal government regulates a category of medications it has classified as suspect from the start.

Let me unpack that, because it matters.

The active pharmaceutical ingredients for most ADHD stimulants come from overseas. When the global supply chain hiccupped in late 2022, U.S. imports of raw amphetamine and a key precursor called phenylacetone contracted sharply, and several mid-sized manufacturers cut production almost simultaneously. The shortage that followed wasn’t really an American shortage; it was the American end of a global problem.

But the global supply problem is only half of it. The other half, the half that actually controls how much medication can reach patients, is the DEA’s annual quota system.

Stimulants are Schedule II controlled substances, which means the DEA sets a hard cap each year on how much active ingredient any manufacturer can possess. The cap is based on backward-looking sales data. Which is to say, on what the country bought last year.

Not on what people need this year. Not on the rising adult diagnoses of the last decade. Not on the explosion of late-diagnosed women in their thirties and forties. Last year’s sales, capped, multiplied out, and good luck.

And that tells you something about the people running the system.

We have a Farmer-style bureaucracy that looks at last year’s harvest, projects forward a similar harvest, and writes the regulations accordingly. It assumes the world is stable, that the past predicts the future, that variability is something to be smoothed out rather than planned for.

A Hunter-style approach would do the opposite. It would build redundancy into the system, source ingredients from multiple regions, hold reserves for surge demand, react quickly when the early signal of a problem appeared, and assume that any complex system will at some point break in ways nobody predicted.

Hunters plan for change. Farmers plan for repetition. Our entire stimulant supply chain, from the API sourcing to the DEA caps, is a Farmer system. And that’s why it’s been failing Hunters for four years and counting.

Here’s where it gets useful, though.

A landmark study published in Cell last December found that stimulant medications don’t actually act on the brain’s attention networks at all. They act on its wakefulness and reward systems. Stimulants raise arousal and pre-load the reward circuitry, which lets a Hunter brain feel awake and engaged enough to stay on a Farmer task. That’s my under-arousal/thalamic-gain theory, validated by modern brain imaging.

Read inside that frame, the shortage looks different. (Not less painful, but different.) If stimulants are operating on arousal and reward, and if a Hunter is suddenly without them, then the question becomes, what else raises arousal and reward in a Hunter brain?

And the answer turns out to be most of the things human beings did with their bodies for the half million years before we invented prescription pharmaceuticals.

Movement raises arousal. A vigorous half hour of physical activity, especially first thing in the morning, can shift a Hunter brain from foggy to engaged for hours afterward.

Sleep raises arousal in a different and equally important way. The same Cell paper noted that adequate sleep replicates many of the effects stimulants produce, and that about half of children and adults aren’t getting enough.

Novelty raises arousal. So does meaningful work. So does sunlight in the eyes within thirty minutes of waking. So does cold water on the face or the body. So does eating real food at regular intervals. So does being in nature for any length of time. So does being deeply engaged with something you actually care about, instead of grinding through something you don’t.

I’m not going to tell you any of this is a substitute for medication if you genuinely need medication: for some Hunters, the stimulant is the difference between functioning and not, and the shortage is causing real suffering for them. I take that seriously, and I’m not minimizing it.

But I am saying the shortage has forced a national rediscovery of something Hunters used to know. The pill is one tool, but it isn’t the only tool. And the Hunters I’ve watched ride this shortage out the best are the ones who’d already built the rest of the toolbox before the supply chain failed them.

A personal note. I’ve had ADHD all my life, and decades of experience on both sides of the medication question. What I can tell you is that the foundation underneath any pharmacological intervention matters more than most pediatricians will ever explain to you.

Sleep, movement, sunlight, novelty, real engagement with real work, time with people who actually understand you. Build that, and you have something. Don’t build it, and the medication carries weight it was never meant to carry by itself. And you discover that fact in the worst possible way the first time the pharmacy runs dry.

The shortage isn’t going away soon. Even with a 25% DEA quota increase in late 2025, supply still hasn’t caught up to demand, and the structural causes (foreign API sourcing, restrictive quotas, manufacturer concentration) haven’t been fixed. The smartest move any Hunter can make right now is to assume the disruption will continue, and to use the next year to build the underneath part of the toolbox while you still have time.

If your medication is currently working, build the foundation now. If your medication has gone missing, start with sleep and movement and sunlight and food, and rebuild from there.

If you’ve never had access to medication in the first place, know that the older Hunter toolkit is real, it’s powerful, and it’s been doing the job for longer than pharmacology has existed.

If this resonates, share it with the Hunter you know who’s been white-knuckling the shortage. And subscribe if you haven’t yet. We’ve got a lot more ground to cover.

Leave a comment

Share

When researchers at Duke University announced last week that they’d built an artificial intelligence tool that can flag ADHD risk in children years before any diagnosis is made, the headlines wrote themselves. Faster diagnosis. Earlier support. Fewer kids slipping through the cracks.

Published in Nature Mental Health on April 27th, the Duke team trained their model on routine electronic medical records from more than 140,000 children, teaching it to recognize the combinations of developmental, behavioral, and clinical events that tend to show up years before pediatricians eventually write the letters A-D-H-D in a chart.

The model works. It’s accurate across sex, race, ethnicity, and insurance status, and it performs well in kids age 5 and older. Senior author Matthew Engelhard, M.D., Ph.D., was careful to emphasize what the tool isn’t:

“This is not an AI doctor,” he told reporters. “It’s a tool to help clinicians focus their time and resources, so kids who need help don’t fall through the cracks or wait years for answers.”

I read all of that, and I thought, well, that depends entirely on what we think “the cracks” are.

Here’s the thing about a tool like this. It’s morally neutral. It just finds patterns. Whether it ends up helping a generation of Hunter kids or harming them depends almost entirely on what the adults in the room believe about ADHD in the first place.

And the adults in the room, meaning the medical system, the schools, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and the average pediatrician, have been working from a “deficit” model for almost ninety years.

Consider the importance — and impact on kids’ lives — the fork in the road this study could present.

If you accept the standard model, the one that says ADHD is a defective attention system that needs to be corrected, then an AI tool that flags it earlier sounds wonderful. Catch the broken brain at four instead of nine. Start the stimulants sooner. Get the kid into special education before he falls behind. Reduce the risk of the long list of bad outcomes supposedly waiting for an unmedicated ADHD kid. Save five wasted years.

But if you’ve been reading my work for any length of time, you know I see this differently. I’ve been arguing for thirty-three years that ADHD isn’t a defective attention system. It’s an evolutionary inheritance.

The traits that look broken in a fluorescent-lit second-grade classroom are the same traits that kept hunting bands alive for half a million years. Hunters scan widely, react quickly, hyperfocus on what’s interesting, get bored fast with what isn’t, take risks, notice patterns nobody else sees, and recover from failure faster than any Farmer would believe possible.

If that’s the model in your head, then the Duke AI suddenly looks completely different.

Imagine an AI tool that flags four-year-olds with Hunter brains. Imagine getting that information at age four. Now imagine two completely different responses to the same flag.

Response one is the current system on autopilot. Earlier evaluation. Earlier diagnosis. Earlier referral to a psychiatrist. Earlier prescription. Five extra years of being told there’s something wrong with you. Five extra years of medication. Five extra years of being managed instead of understood. The flag becomes a label. The label becomes an identity. The kid grows up believing he’s the broken one.

Response two starts with the same flag and ends somewhere else entirely. The pediatrician says:

“Your child appears to have a Hunter brain. Here’s what that means. Here’s what tends to work for these kids, and what tends to backfire. Let’s talk about how to set up his life so the wiring works for him instead of against him.”

The parents go home and start designing the right environment. They understand why he won’t sit still through circle time, and stop fighting it. They make sure he gets enough physical movement, enough sleep, enough novelty, enough engagement with things that genuinely interest him.

They find a school that doesn’t try to flatten Hunter kids into Farmer shapes. They build a life around the Hunter instead of trying to bend the Hunter into a life that was never built for him. Medication may still be part of the picture, but it’s one tool in a toolbox, not the entire response.

Same kid. Same flag. Same AI prediction. Two completely different futures.

There’s a deeper issue in the technology itself that I want parents and clinicians to take seriously. The Duke model didn’t learn to identify Hunter brains; that’s not what it was trained to do. It was trained on the diagnostic decisions of the existing system, learning the pattern of medical events that historically precede an ADHD diagnosis in our current healthcare environment.

Which means the AI isn’t really predicting ADHD. It’s predicting whether your particular child is on a trajectory to be processed through the existing diagnostic machine. The model sees future patients, not future successful Hunters. Whether being a future patient is a good outcome or a bad one depends entirely on what that machine does once it has them.

There’s something else worth noticing, and it has a quiet beauty to it.

An AI that scans massive datasets looking for subtle patterns nobody else has seen, that picks up signal where everyone else sees noise, that recognizes a constellation of small events that together tell a larger story, is doing exactly what a Hunter brain was built to do!

We’ve built a digital tracker. The question is whether the people deploying it are tracking with the eye of a Farmer who wants to fence Hunters in, or with the eye of someone who wants to find them and set them up for the lives they were actually built for.

A personal note. I was a behavior problem early on; I still remember Mrs. Clark in 2nd grade saying, “Tommy, even a fish wouldn’t get caught if it kept its mouth shut,” and, “An empty wagon always rattles.” School was hard for me until I was admitted into a gifted kids class when I was eight (Eisenhower launched that program in response to Sputnik), and most of the adults around me had concluded that the problem was me.

If a tool like the Duke model had existed when I was four and had flagged me, I’m honestly not sure whether that would have made my childhood better or worse. The flag itself is just information: what would have made the difference is what came next.

Did the adults around me have a framework for understanding what they were looking at? Did anyone tell my parents that the kid bouncing off the walls might grow up to build businesses, save lives, write books, and host America’s number one progressive national radio show? Did anyone help them build a life around how I’m wired?

Or would early identification just have meant earlier medication, earlier stigma, and earlier conviction on my part that I was the broken one?

That’s the question every parent should ask if their pediatrician starts using a tool like this. Not “is the AI accurate,” because it probably is. The question is, “What do you, doctor, plan to do with the information?”

If the answer is “earlier evaluation and likely earlier medication,” that’s one path. If the answer is “earlier conversation with you about how to set this child up for the life he’s wired for,” that’s a very different one.

We’re about to have a lot more information about Hunter kids a lot earlier than we ever have before. That information can liberate them, or it can lock them in. The technology has arrived. The question is whether our understanding has caught up to it.

If you want to keep these conversations going, subscribe and share this with the parent of a young Hunter who needs to hear it. The tools are getting more powerful by the year. We need to make sure the framework we use them inside of is worthy of the kids we’re using them on.

Leave a comment

Share

A Cell journal paper found ADHD stimulants don’t act on “attention” regions at all, while a Nature Neuroscience paper found better focus comes from quieting the brain, not revving it up. Both findings line up exactly with my under-arousal theory of the Hunter brain.

For 89 years, we’ve been treating attention deficit hyperactivity disorder with stimulants based on a guess. A pretty good guess, as guesses go. But still a guess.

In 1937, a Rhode Island physician named Charles Bradley noticed that amphetamine seemed to calm down what he called “behavioral problem children.” He proposed that the drug must be working by sharpening the attention-control regions of their brains, giving them more voluntary control over what they noticed and what they ignored.

The idea stuck. By the 1970s, stimulants were being prescribed widely for behavior problems. By 1980, the diagnosis got the name we know today. And for the next four and a half decades, every pediatrician, every parent, every teacher, every kid handed a small orange pill at the school nurse’s office was told the same story: this medication helps you pay attention.

It turns out that isn’t what stimulants do.

A landmark study published in Cell on December 24th, led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, did something almost nobody had thought to do in the entire history of ADHD medication. They asked, with modern brain imaging tools, what stimulants actually do inside the brain.

They scanned nearly 12,000 children from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, plus a smaller group of highly-sampled adults given precise doses of methylphenidate (Ritalin).

The result rearranges everything.

The drugs, they discovered, don’t act on attention networks like the psychiatric industry had assumed for nearly a century. Not the dorsal attention network. Not the executive control regions Bradley thought he was hitting.

Instead, they act on the brain’s wakefulness systems and its reward and salience networks. As study co-author Nico Dosenbach put it, “stimulants pre-reward our brains and allow us to keep working at things that wouldn’t normally hold our interest, like our least favorite class in school.”

That sentence says, in plain language, what I’ve been saying since 1993, when I published the first edition of ADHD: A Hunter In A Farmer’s World. The drugs don’t “fix a broken attention system” because there is no “broken” attention system. What the drugs do is raise the brain’s arousal level and pre-load the reward circuitry, until a Hunter brain finally feels awake and motivated enough to engage with a Farmer task.

That’s my under-arousal/thalamic-gain theory in one sentence. It’s been my argument for thirty-three years. And now Cell journal has the brain scans to prove it.

Here’s the part that should give every parent and every adult Hunter inspiration.

The same Cell paper notes that taking stimulants “reversed the effects of sleep deprivation” on both brain connectivity and school grades. The authors write, almost as an aside, that “some of the benefits of stimulants could also be attained by getting sufficient sleep each night, something about half of children and adults go without.”

Stimulant medication, in other words, is functioning as a chemical workaround for chronically tired, chronically under-aroused, chronically under-engaged children sitting in classrooms that bore them. Currently 24.6% of American boys between ages 10 and 19 are taking these drugs. A quarter of our teenage boys.

I’m not making an anti-medication argument. I’ve never made one in all these years. In fact, in the 1990s when I was first digging into this field, I tried them myself.

For some Hunters, the right stimulant at the right dose is the difference between failing out of school and discovering they’re brilliant at something. But it matters enormously what we think the medication is doing, because that determines what else we try.

If we believe the drug is fixing a broken attention system, then medication is the answer and everything else is window dressing. If we understand that the drug is raising arousal and reward in a Hunter brain that’s bored and tired in a Farmer environment, then a whole list of other interventions opens up: Sufficient sleep. Novelty. Physical movement. Meaningful work. Time outside. Engagement with something the kid actually cares about. All of those raise arousal and engagement through the front door, the way nature designed.

Now consider the importance of the second study.

A separate paper published in Nature Neuroscience and summarized by ScienceDaily in early January tackled focus from the opposite direction. Researchers at Rockefeller University led by Priya Rajasethupathy ran what they called a “Herculean” genetic mapping study across 200 mice bred from eight parental strains.

They were looking for genes that influence attention. What they found was that a gene called Homer1, in two specific forms (Homer1a and Ania3), accounted for almost 20 percent of the variation in attention performance across the mice. That’s a huge effect size for a single gene.

The surprising part wasn’t that they found a gene. The surprising part was what the gene does.

Mice that performed best on attention tasks had less Homer1 activity in their prefrontal cortex, not more. The neurons in the focused mice weren’t firing more; they were firing less, but more selectively. The gene was upregulating the brain’s molecular brakes (GABA receptors), reducing background noise, and saving neural firing for moments that actually mattered. Better focus came from a calmer brain, not a busier one.

Zachary Gershon, the PhD student who led the work and who lives with ADHD himself, told the press something worth quoting:

“Deep breathing, mindfulness, meditation, calming the nervous system. People consistently report better focus following these activities.”

His senior author Rajasethupathy added that the team is now working on a medication that would have, in her words, “a similar quieting effect as meditation.”

Take the two studies together and a unified picture comes into focus. The Hunter brain isn’t running an attention deficit: it’s running an arousal deficit and a noise problem.

Baseline arousal sits low, scanning runs constantly, the system stays busy looking for the rustle in the grass. In a hunting band, that’s a feature. The watcher who never stops noticing is the watcher who saves the band.

In a fluorescent-lit classroom doing fractions, though, the same nervous system is bored and noisy at the same time. Bored because nothing in the environment is rewarding enough to pull the system into engagement. Noisy because, with nothing real to track, the scanner stays on, picking up everything from the air conditioner hum to the kid two rows over chewing gum.

Stimulants address one half of that. They raise arousal and pre-load reward, so the boring task feels engaging enough to work on. Meditation, deep breathing, exercise, sleep, and possibly future medications targeting Homer1, address the other half. They quiet the noise. Different mechanisms, both pointing at the same underlying truth about how a Hunter brain works.

I want to add a personal note. I’ve had ADHD my whole life, and I’ve also had a productive life by most measures. The thing that worked for me wasn’t getting better at paying attention. It was building a life designed around a Hunter nervous system.

I move a lot. I sleep when my body asks for it. I have several fascinations going at once because that’s what keeps me engaged. I’ve built a career out of work that demands constant novelty and quick context-switching, which is to say I’ve built a career out of not sitting in a fluorescent-lit classroom doing fractions; instead, I’ve started a half-dozen businesses, written over 50 books (35 published), and traveled the world doing international relief work. When I need deep focus, I get it the way Hunters always have. By chasing something that genuinely interests me.

What strikes me about reading these two new studies side by side is how completely they validate the lifestyle interventions that ADHD adults have been quietly using for decades. Better sleep raises arousal. Exercise raises arousal. Meaningful work raises arousal. Meditation quiets noise. Time in nature does both.

None of these are alternatives to a stimulant prescription if a Hunter genuinely needs one. They’re the foundation underneath the prescription, the things that determine whether medication is one tool in a Hunter’s life or the only thing keeping the Hunter upright.

For 89 years, we built our entire approach to ADHD around a guess that turned out to be wrong. The drugs were never sharpening attention: they were raising the volume on a brain running too quiet, in a context built for brains running louder. Now that we know this, the question isn’t whether to keep the medications; it’s how to build the rest of the life the medications were quietly compensating for.

If you’ve been told your whole life that there’s something defective about your attention, take this one piece of news with you. There isn’t. Your brain is doing exactly what a Hunter brain is supposed to do. The work now is to live in a way that lets it do that job well.

If this piece reframes something for you, share it with someone who needs to hear it, and subscribe if you haven’t already. Thirty-three years in, thank G-d, the science is finally catching up!

Leave a comment

Share

When researchers analyzed 1,154 brain scans of children and adolescents for a study just published in JAMA Psychiatry, they discovered something the diagnostic manual hasn’t been able to account for. They found three distinct neurological subtypes of ADHD, and one of them doesn’t look anything like the textbook pictures most parents and teachers have memorized.

It isn’t the spacey kid staring out the window, distracted by squirrels. It isn’t the fidgeter rattling his leg under the desk. It’s the kid who erupts.

The one who collapses on the floor screaming, who throws things, who flips from joy to fury in the space of a heartbeat. Healthline’s coverage of the same study notes that each of these three biotypes showed distinct brain chemistry, which suggests we may need to start treating these kids as fundamentally different cases, not just dialed-up versions of the same condition.

The medical world is calling this third group the “severe” subtype. The press is calling it the “extreme” form. A psychiatrist quoted in National Geographic’s reporting on the study described these children as the group “most at risk for developing future psychiatric problems, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, substance abuse, and criminality.”

I read that sentence three times. Then I thought about every hunting band that ever walked this planet, and I realized something. Modern psychiatry just rediscovered the warrior. They put him in a brain scanner and labeled him a problem.

For most of human history, a band that consisted entirely of cautious, low-key, mildly curious people would not have lasted a single bad winter. Hunting bands didn’t survive on emotional regulation. They survived because they had specialists.

Some were the watchers, the trackers, the ones who scanned the horizon for hours noticing what others missed. Some were the strategists, the steady hands who could sit by a fire and plan the next move.

And some, usually a smaller number, maybe two or three in a band of thirty, were the ones who’d put themselves between the children and the cave bear without thinking. The ones who’d run toward the threat.

You can probably guess what their nervous systems looked like.

The warrior temperament wasn’t built for sitting in a circle of grass weaving baskets. It was built for sudden, total, high-intensity engagement with a world that occasionally tried to kill everyone in it. Big emotions. Fast triggers. Explosive action when the moment demanded it, and a difficult time settling down once the danger passed.

Ask any combat veteran what it feels like coming home from a deployment, and you’ll hear a version of the same story. The nervous system that saved you over there is the same one that breaks dishes over here.

Now imagine that nervous system in a second-grade classroom.

The new JAMA Psychiatry research notes something quietly devastating in passing: emotional dysregulation isn’t even listed in the formal DSM diagnostic criteria for ADHD. Which means clinicians have been watching this kid for decades and have had no slot to put him in.

The kid who explodes when the substitute teacher changes the schedule isn’t following a script the manual recognizes. So he gets stacked with diagnoses, ADHD plus oppositional defiant disorder, plus maybe anxiety, plus probably a mood disorder, plus eventually a personality disorder once he’s old enough.

Layer after layer of pathology stacked on top of one underlying truth: this is a warrior Hunter wired for an environment that hasn’t existed for ten thousand years.

The Hunter/Farmer hypothesis I first laid out three decades ago was never just a metaphor. It was an evolutionary argument about what kinds of nervous systems different ecological niches selected for.

And within the broader category of Hunter, there were always subtypes. The scout. The tracker. The forager. And yes, the warrior. The one whose baseline arousal was so low that ordinary daily life felt like sitting on a slow leak, and whose response to genuine threat was so total that nothing else in the band could match it.

That’s the under-arousal piece (my “thalamic gain” theory), and it matters here. These brains run at a quieter idle than Farmer brains. They need more stimulation to feel awake, more challenge to feel engaged, more intensity to feel alive.

The warrior subtype takes that all the way to the edge. Their idle is the lowest of all. And when something does cut through, a frustration, a rule change, a perceived injustice, a broken expectation, the response arrives at full volume because that’s the only volume their system has when it finally engages.

Read through that lens, the “emotional dysregulation” of the new third subtype stops looking like pathology and starts looking like a specific evolutionary tool encountering a context it was never designed for.

These kids feel nothing for hours, and then they feel everything at once. They go from off to maximum with no in-between. That isn’t a broken thermostat. That’s a dial built with only two settings, because in a hunting band’s ecology, the in-between settings were a luxury you couldn’t afford.

So what do we do with this third type of kid?

The medical answer right now is more medication, earlier intervention, and warnings to parents about the long list of psychiatric futures their child is supposedly racing toward.

I’m not going to tell you medication is wrong. For some warrior Hunters, the right stimulant at the right dose is the thing that lets them function in school long enough to discover what they’re actually good at. I’ve seen it save families.

But I’ve also seen what happens when medication is the only intervention, when nobody around the kid ever gets curious about why this nervous system exists in the first place.

Here’s what gets missed.

Warrior Hunters don’t need to be subdued: they need to be channeled. They need to be put in environments where their intensity is an asset, not a liability. They need physical work that exhausts them honestly.

They need adults who can hold their own when these kids push, instead of crumbling or escalating. They need rituals and rules of engagement they can predict, because what looks like defiance is often a warrior nervous system bracing for an attack that never came.

They need to be told, in words and in actions, that the part of them that flares up isn’t the part that’s wrong with them. It’s the part that, in the right life, is going to make them remarkable.

I’ve sat with parents of warrior Hunter kids for more than forty years. The parents who do best are the ones who stop trying to flatten their child into a Farmer shape and start asking what kind of life this Hunter is built for. The kids who do best are the ones who hear, early and often, that their intensity is a feature, not a flaw.

If you’ve got a kid like this, or if you grew up as a kid like this and you’re reading this thinking “that was me,” take one thing from this study. The brain scans are real. The chemistry is real. The difference is real. But “severe” is a Farmer’s word for something a hunting band would have called “essential.”

Your child isn’t broken. You weren’t broken. You were built for a world that knew it needed you. The work now is to build a piece of life around them, and around you, that remembers the same thing.

If this piece resonates, share it with the parent, teacher, or grown warrior in your life who needs to hear it today. The first reframe is often the one that changes everything. And if you’re new here, subscribe and join the conversation. We’ve been having it for thirty years, and it’s only getting more urgent.

Leave a comment

Share

One of the real struggles us Hunters typically have is sorting out the urgent from the important. It’s challenged me my entire life, and one of my correspondents had some very, very insightful thoughts on the subject:

Steve in Philadelphia says:

I’ve always kept a to-do list, and am pretty good about keeping dates organized on my laptop calendar. (I’m so ADHD and inherently disorga­nized, these are survival strategies!) A few years ago, though, a friend shared with me a concept which has literally changed my life.

I was going through my list of things to do with him, mostly bragging and complaining about how swamped I was.

“A lot of that seems urgent," he said. “But how much of it is important?”

“All of it!” I replied indignantly.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I’ll bet a lot of those things that you think are important are really not all that important if you examine them in the context of your life’s goals. They just seem important, because they’re urgent.”

I was lost and asked him to explain.

“When the phone rings, is that urgent or important?” he asked.

“Both!” I said.

He shook his head. “Nope. You only know that it’s urgent. The ringing creates the urgency. But what if it’s some guy trying to sell you insurance?”

“I guess it could be either.”

“Right. Some things are urgent, but not important. Some are im­portant, but not urgent. Some are neither, and some are both.”

“So I should only do the urgent and important things?" I said.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s the most common mistake people make. And what happens is that they end up not doing the important things, because they’re constantly dealing only with the urgent/important things. Remem­ber the song Cat’s Cradle’?”

I nodded, thinking about the song about the dad who was always putting his son off, and when the son grew up he started ignoring his dad.

“Your family is important to you, right?” he said.

I nodded again, starting to see his point.

“But I’ll bet you haven’t spent much time with your kids this week, because you’ve been dealing with so many urgent things. So, instead, write down that you’re going to spend time with the kids. That’s import­ant, and it needs to be done, too. And you’ll find the same thing is true in business, in your relationship with your wife, and in just about every other area of your life.”

So now whenever I’m looking over my To Do list, I ask myself, “Is this item important, or just urgent?”

And I’ve learned that my Hunter instinct pushes me toward handling the urgent things first, when actu­ally they’re often not even all that important; they’re just easy to check off the list, or the most recent thing that was in my face. So now I’m working hard to deal with the important things, too.

Share

Something remarkable is happening in the American economy right now, hiding in plain sight behind all the headlines about tariffs and inflation and market volatility: One in three American adults says they plan to start a new business or side hustle in 2026.

That is not a typo. One in three. It represents a 94 percent increase over the same measure from just last year, the highest level of entrepreneurial intent ever recorded in the country.

Sixty-eight percent of aspiring entrepreneurs report feeling a sense of urgency about launching. Fifty-seven percent say they’ll do it even if economic conditions aren’t ideal. Fifty percent of those who earned money from a side hustle last year didn’t even bother to register their business, creating what researchers are now calling an “invisible entrepreneurship economy” of staggering size.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the Hunter brain for more than thirty years, and I want to offer a different explanation for this surge than the ones you’ll find in the business press.

Yes, AI has lowered the barriers to starting a company. Yes, the gig economy has normalized working outside traditional employment. Yes, the job market has become more volatile and workers are hedging their bets. All of that is true and worth understanding.

But underneath all of it, I think something more fundamental is happening. I think the Hunters are waking up.

The corporate employment model that dominated the twentieth century was, in almost every structural respect, designed by and for Farmers. The forty-hour week. The defined role with clear boundaries. The performance review tied to quarterly targets. The requirement that you show up at the same desk at the same time every day and work on the same set of responsibilities in approximately the same way, year after year, until you retire.

That model has real virtues for the people it was designed for. It provides the stability and structure that the Farmer brain runs on. It rewards patience, consistency, and the ability to grind through repetitive tasks without losing focus.

But for the Hunters among us, it’s a slow suffocation.

I’ve heard some version of the same story from Hunters all over the world, across decades of conversations and correspondence. They get the job because their energy and creativity and rapid-fire thinking makes them impressive in interviews. They spend the first few months hyperfocused and performing brilliantly.

And then the novelty wears off, the stimulation drops, the brain starts searching for something worth paying attention to, and the performance evaluations start to say things like “difficulty prioritizing” and “doesn’t always follow established procedures” and “tends to go off-script.”

A few of them claw their way into management or sales or some other role where the constant novelty keeps their brains engaged. Most of them eventually leave.

What they’re leaving for, more and more, is exactly what the data is now measuring. Their own thing. Their own hunt.

Wilson Harrell, the late founder of Formula 409 and former publisher of Inc. Magazine (who wrote a foreword for my book ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World), told me years ago that he’d organized his entire professional life around one principle: never do anything that doesn’t give him a jolt.

The paperwork went to assistants. The taxes went to accountants. Everything that could bore a Hunter brain was delegated, so that Harrell could spend his time doing the things that Hunter brains are genuinely extraordinary at: scanning for opportunity, making fast decisions, pivoting without regret, selling with infectious energy, building something from nothing.

That’s the template. And what the 2026 entrepreneurship data is showing us is that a critical mass of people, most of them probably without any framework for understanding why the traditional employment model has never quite fit, are independently discovering the same truth that Harrell (and I) lived by.

They’re building their professional lives around what their brains actually do well instead of spending those lives apologizing for what their brains don’t do well.

The Hunt is not just a metaphor. In the Paleolithic, the Hunter quite literally fed the tribe, took enormous risks to do it, worked without a safety net, and had to invent new strategies constantly because the prey was always different and the forest was always changing.

The entrepreneur starting a business in 2026 with an AI tool and a credit card and a half-formed idea and an urgency she can’t entirely explain is doing exactly the same thing. She is reading the environment, making a move, and accepting that the outcome is uncertain.

Farmers find that terrifying. Hunters find it exhilarating.

If you’ve spent your career in the corporate world feeling vaguely out of place, if you’ve been told you’re “too much” or “too scattered” or “too easily distracted,” if you have a list of half-finished projects and a brain that is right now probably thinking about seven things that aren’t this article, consider that the American economy may finally be building the kind of hunting grounds you were born for.

The statistics say one in three. I suspect, among the readers of this newsletter, the number is considerably higher.

Leave a comment

Share

Last month, researchers at Monash University published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience that I found myself reading with a strange mixture of vindication and amusement.

The study found that people with ADHD, even while fully awake and attempting to complete tasks, experience brief episodes in which the brain slips into something that looks exactly like sleep. These micro-episodes of sleep-like neural activity, the researchers found, were directly correlated with attention lapses, slower reaction times, and increased errors.

The study’s author, Elaine Pinggal, explained it this way:

“Sleep-like brain activity is like going for a long run and getting tired. The brain gets fatigued and briefly disconnects from the task at hand.”

That’s a fine explanation as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough, because what the neuroscience community is circling around with increasing urgency is something I first wrote about in the early 1990s: the ADHD brain is not broken. It is bored.

And boredom, for the Hunter brain, is not a character flaw. It is a physiological state, as real and as measurable as hunger.

Here is what I wrote in my book on Adult ADHD, describing what was then a fairly controversial theory:

“People with ADHD behave the way they do because their brains are chronically under-aroused. While from the outside the person with ADHD may look hyperactive or scattered, on the inside the experience is one of drifting. Slipping away. The sensation of consciousness receding.

“And in response to that, the person does what any sensible organism does when it’s sinking: it lurches upward toward wakefulness. It creates a crisis, makes an inappropriate joke, starts a fight, jumps up and paces around. Not because it’s overstimulated, but because it’s desperate for stimulation.”

The Monash University study is describing the same phenomenon from the inside of a brain scanner. The ADHD brain, during what should be a focused task, is intermittently switching into sleep mode.

Not because the person is lazy or unfocused by choice, but because the neural architecture that keeps the brain engaged at low-arousal tasks simply isn’t firing the way it does in a neurotypical brain.

Now think about that from the evolutionary perspective that is the foundation of the Hunter/Farmer model.

The Hunter, moving through a forest ten thousand years ago, did not need sustained attention during the long stretches between prey. Sustained attention on a static landscape is actually counterproductive for a Hunter, because it narrows focus to the point where peripheral threats go unnoticed.

What kept the Hunter alive during those long, uneventful stretches was the ability to enter a kind of semi-vigilant open awareness, scanning broadly, staying alert to novelty rather than locked onto any one thing.

The brain that could do that, that could let consciousness expand and drift and scan instead of bearing down on a single point, was the brain that caught the flicker of movement in the tall grass before it became a problem.

The sleep-like brain waves that the Monash researchers measured in ADHD adults during boring tasks are not malfunction. They’re the Hunter’s ancient environmental scanner, still running as designed, still broadcasting at the frequency it evolved for, inside a world of fluorescent lighting and Excel spreadsheets and thirty-minute meetings about next quarter’s deliverables, a world it was never built for and has no idea how to interpret.

What happens to that same brain in a genuinely stimulating situation? Every parent of a child with ADHD already knows the answer. The video game. The creative project. The crisis. The thing the child has been passionately interested in for the last three weeks.

The sleep-like neural static vanishes and is replaced by something that researchers call hyperfocus: a state of attention so intense and so sustained that it is, in many ways, the mirror opposite of what anyone would expect from someone diagnosed with an attention deficit.

There is no deficit. There is selectivity. The Hunter’s brain has not lost the ability to pay attention. It has instead preserved, perfectly, the ability to pay exactly the right kind of attention for exactly the right circumstances, and it is simply waiting for circumstances worthy of paying attention to.

What the Monash study adds to this picture is the elegant detail of mechanism. We can now see, at the level of brain activity, the moment the Hunter’s mind decides the present environment isn’t worth full consciousness.

We can watch it slip into that scanning, semi-aware, open-monitoring state that served our ancestors so well and serves the Farmer’s world so poorly.

I suspect the researchers will keep finding things like this. The science is doing what science does: catching up to what many of us who actually live in these brains have known for a very long time.

As TIME Magazine wrote in the headline of their 1994 article about my first book on ADHD and its hypothesis: “Hail to The Hyperactive Hunter!”

Leave a comment

Share

A year ago this week, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and declared April 2nd “Liberation Day,” announcing sweeping tariffs on virtually everything the United States imports. Within days, the stock market had shed trillions of dollars in value. Within months, the policy had been struck down by the Supreme Court, reimposed in new forms, partially refunded, re-litigated, and announced yet again.

One Colorado retailer absorbed $25,000 in tariff costs in a single fall season. Economists have taken to calling the era the “Trump freeze,” as businesses found they simply couldn’t plan for a future that changed by the hour.

“Businesses need predictability to grow,” said Colorado’s state treasurer last month. “But what they’re getting instead is tariff whiplash. Policies are announced and they’re changed.”

He’s right, of course. But here’s what he almost certainly doesn’t know: he just perfectly described why Farmers fail and Hunters thrive during times of crisis like we’re experiencing today between the tariffs, the war with Iran, and Trump’s draconian cuts to social programs and threat to end Medicare.

The entire premise of the agricultural revolution — the moment, roughly twelve thousand years ago, when human societies began to shift from hunting and gathering to planting and harvesting — is that farming requires predictability.

You plant in spring because you know, with confidence, that summer will follow. You store grain because you trust the cycle will repeat. Farming is, at its most fundamental level, a bet on the future behaving like the past.

The Farmer’s brain, shaped over ten thousand years of agricultural civilization, is exquisitely tuned to stability. Rules, routines, and long planning horizons are not just preferences for the Farmer type — they are the operating system.

The Hunter’s brain works on entirely different firmware.

When our ancestors were tracking game across an African savanna or a European forest ten thousand years before the first wheat was ever planted, the environment changed moment to moment.

A storm front moved in. The herd shifted direction. A predator appeared at the tree line. The Hunter who stopped to make a careful, methodical, long-range plan was the Hunter who went hungry, or worse.

What kept the Hunter alive was rapid environmental scanning, instant decision-making, and the ability to abandon a strategy the moment conditions changed. Adaptability wasn’t a nice quality. It was the whole game.

Now look at what the tariff and war chaos have actually produced in the American economy. One executive after another has used the word “impossible” when asked to describe planning for the year ahead. “It’s impossible to plan,” Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon, told Reuters. “You hear that tariffs are off, and you are considering how to get refunds. Then a few hours later, it’s 10 percent. Then it’s 15 percent the next day.”

For Farmer-brained executives running Farmer-brained corporations, that kind of environment is genuinely paralyzing.

The spreadsheets don’t work. The five-year plans are worthless. The supply chains they spent decades optimizing have to be thrown out and rebuilt, sometimes repeatedly, against a backdrop of policy that may change again before the new approach is fully implemented.

Volkswagen’s CEO recently told investors that “a structural reset is required” and that “there are unfortunately no quick fixes.” That’s the sound of a Farmer staring at a field that used to grow wheat and now grows something nobody has a name for yet.

But I keep thinking about the other side of that equation. I keep thinking about all the Hunters I’ve known over the decades, the ones who were told their whole lives that they couldn’t focus, couldn’t plan, couldn’t stick with anything long enough to make it work.

The ones who drove their teachers and managers half-crazy with their inability to follow established procedure. The ones who are, right now, looking at this economic landscape and feeling something that the Farmer-brained executives around them definitely are not feeling.

They’re feeling alive.

The Hunter doesn’t need the ground to stay still. The Hunter needs the ground to move, because that’s when the scanning skill kicks in, when the rapid pivoting becomes an advantage instead of a liability, when the ability to abandon last week’s plan without grief or guilt turns out to be exactly what the moment demands.

The “chaos,” as everyone is calling it, is simply the conditions under which the Hunter was built to operate.

I’m not suggesting the tariff policy or war with Iran are good economic policy, because by most measures they aren’t. Manufacturing employment is down. Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Small businesses have been hammered. These are real costs and real people bearing them.

But I am suggesting that inside every economic disruption there are always people who thrive precisely because of the disruption, and that those people almost always turn out to have what the medical establishment has spent the last fifty years calling a disorder.

Thomas Edison, who I’ve written about for three decades as perhaps the most famous Edison-gene Hunter in American history, built his greatest achievements during periods of extraordinary technological and economic chaos. He wasn’t successful despite the uncertainty of the Gilded Age. He was successful because his brain was perfectly adapted to it.

The question worth asking yourself, if you’re a Hunter reading this in the middle of what economists are calling unprecedented volatility, is not “how do I survive this chaos?”

The question is: “What can I build inside it that the Farmers around me can’t even see yet?”

Get out there and join the hunt, and good luck!

Leave a comment

I’ve known, admired, and respected Sari Solden for decades and wanted to let you know that she’s now on Substack with a dynamite newsletter called “The Inner Work of Adult ADHD.” It’s free and I strongly recommend you click on that link to sign up! Here’s a sample post of hers, along with an introductory note:

I am happy to share this post with Thom’s readers. Thom and I started out in the field of adult ADHD around the same time, many years ago, with the same publisher. He and I shared the same rebellious nature or free spirit in the field and broke some rules that brought about good change! So I feel a kindred spirit with Thom and marvel at how over thirty years later we are now at very different places in the world but both here on Substack still trying to change the world one reader at a time! I think this message of “A Letter from Your Brain” will appeal to all the neurodivergent women (and men) out there.

The message of accepting and embracing who you are, all of who you are, not trying to change or fix yourself in order to be meet some cultural expectation or norm is something Thom and I have both believed from the beginning. I have been a therapist for women and men with ADHD for over thirty years and the work I have done is centered on this kind of radical self-acceptance. I’d love to hear what you think.

With gratitude,

Sari

Subscribe to Sari's Newsletter

A Letter From Your Brain
(to Women With ADHD)

by Sari Solden

I have a guest host today who is tired of hearing me talk about “her”.

She asked to speak directly to you.

Sari Solden: The Inner Work of Adult ADHD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Think of this as a letter from your brain—your overworked, loyal, misunderstood brain—to you. The you who is trying so hard. The you who is exhausted by trying so hard. The you who keeps thinking the answer is “more”: more effort, more structure, more fixing, more self-improvement… and who ends up feeling like less.

Today, I want to let your brain speak for herself.

You can name her if you like.

She might like that.

(it also might help you to humanize her a little bit)

A Letter From Your Overworked Brain

Dear you,

I’m your brain.

I know you usually talk about me, or complain about me, or try to fix me, but you don’t often listen to me. So today, I’m asking you to pause and really hear me.

I’m not your enemy.
I’m not your defect.
I’m not your “project.”

I am a powerful force.

And I am tired.

You keep me locked in a little mental cubicle, working double and triple shifts, trying to make up for all the ways you think I fall short. You push me harder because you’re scared—scared I’ll drop the ball, say the wrong thing, forget, or fail again. You’re afraid of judgment, of disappointment, of confirming what you fear others already think of you.

So you tighten your grip.

You push me.
You criticize me.
You compare me.

You keep me “on” long after I’ve told you I’m done for the day.

And I do try to tell you. I tell you when I’m overstressed, when I’m foggy, when I can’t focus, when your body feels tense and your mood drops and everything feels heavy and stupid and wrong. That’s me, waving my arms, saying:

Please. I need air.
I need rest.
I need play.
I need to dream.

You think that if you loosen your grip on me, I’ll fall apart. The secret I need you to know is this:

The tighter you hold me,
the harder you push,
the less I can actually help you.

When you deprive me of oxygen and joy and meaning and movement, my voice shrinks. Your world dims. Your motivation disappears. I get quieter and more stubborn and less cooperative. And then you blame me for not being “better.”

I’m asking—no, I’m pleading—with you:

Stop trying to get rid of me.
Stop trying to turn me into someone else’s brain.
Stop banishing me to second-class status in your own life.

I am your central processing system.
I run everything you do.

What if, instead of treating me like a problem to solve, you treated me like a partner?

What if you elevated me to the queen bee status I already hold?

Because here’s what I can do for you—when I am cared for, respected, and allowed to be who I am:

• I can think beautiful thoughts.

• I can imagine worlds and futures you haven’t even dreamed of yet.

• I can make connections and see patterns other people miss.

• I can create ideas and insights that are uniquely, wonderfully yours.

But not while I’m locked in a cell.
Not while you are shaming me.
Not while every interaction between us is a scolding.

I want to be your friend.
I want to help you build a life that feels like yours.
I want to help you grow into all those things you secretly dream of.

To do that, I need something from you.

Your Brain’s Requests

Take an hour for me this week.

Just one hour.

Use a voice memo, a notebook, your laptop, or simply sit somewhere quiet. And instead of making another to-do list, I want you to answer these questions to me—your brain:

1. When do you feel most alive?

2. When do you feel the worst?

Then ask:

4. How could you treat me better?

How could you treat me if you were assuming I was doing my very best under hard conditions, instead of assuming I’m lazy, broken, or “not enough”?

Remember: I notice everything.

I notice when I’m tired and you ignore it.
I notice when I’m overstimulated and you keep scrolling.
I notice when I need a walk, and you glue us to the chair.
I notice when we need a day or even an hour to recover, play, stare out a window, listen to music, or do nothing “productive” at all.

I need some time each day to:

• wander

• dream

• gather my thoughts

• let creative ideas rise to the surface

I cannot do that if every spare moment is turned into
another system, another hack, another piece of self-criticism.

If you experiment with this—if you start noticing how you treat me, and gently, gradually shift it—here’s what I can promise:

Over time, as you become my ally instead of my harsh taskmaster, I will reward you.

Your mind will feel richer, more alive.
You will have more access to the best of me: creativity, insight, humor, passion, big-heartedness.
You’ll begin to sense what’s actually possible for us, together, when I’m not living under constant suspicion and pressure.

We may still need some outside help—a calendar, a coach, an “admin brain” in human or digital form to support the things I don’t do naturally. That’s okay. That’s not failure. That’s a wise partnership.

With your energy
and my unique wiring
and a bit of practical support,

we can build a life that fits us—not the imaginary woman you keep thinking you’re supposed to be.

Please, let’s form a partnership.

Not by fixing me into someone else’s brain,
but by honoring the one you have.

With love,
Your Brain

From me (Sari) to you:

This is the heart of the “inner work” I want to keep exploring with you here.

Not just understanding ADHD. Not just watching webinars, reading, or attending support groups—although those can all be helpful. But learning how to live with your brain in a new way, week by week, in real time. Learning how not to spend your whole life in recovery mode from the way you’ve treated yourself.

I’ll keep offering you language, frameworks, and practices for doing this. For now, just start with that one hour, and those questions.

Let your brain write to you.
And write back.

Subscribe to Sari's Newsletter

Share

A paper published this month in the British Journal of Psychiatry has reignited one of the most reliably circular arguments in all of medicine: “Is ADHD overdiagnosed or isn’t it?”

A team of researchers from Cambridge, Southampton, and Nottingham came down firmly on the isn’t-it side. Overdiagnosis is not the problem, they said. In fact, many people who need a diagnosis still don’t have one.

Waiting times in the UK have stretched to two and three years in some cases, and lack of insurance or the unwillingness of insurance companies to cover psychology or psychiatry are creating a similar crisis here in the US. The real scandal isn’t that too many people are being told they have ADHD. The real scandal is that too many people who have it are still waiting for anyone to notice.

They’re almost certainly right about that, and the waiting list problem is real and serious and deserves the attention they’re giving it.

Undiagnosed and unsupported ADHD carries genuine costs. Academic failure, damaged relationships, substance abuse, the slow erosion of self-worth that comes from spending decades being told you’re lazy or careless or just not trying hard enough.

The researchers are right that those costs are chronically undercounted in the overdiagnosis conversation, and right that the people demanding we slow down and diagnose less carefully are often causing real harm to real people who are already suffering.

But I’ve been watching this argument cycle around for thirty years now, and every time it surfaces I notice the same thing. Both sides are fighting over the same piece of ground, and neither side ever steps back far enough to ask whether the ground itself is worth fighting over.

The entire debate — overdiagnosed, underdiagnosed, the waiting lists, the diagnostic criteria, the DSM threshold, the screening tools, the disagreements between clinicians — every bit of it rests on a foundation that nobody in the argument ever examines.

That foundation is the assumption that ADHD is a disease. A pathology. Something that, in a well-functioning brain in a well-functioning world, would not exist. A deviation from the norm that medicine is correct to identify, label, and treat.

Once you accept that assumption, the overdiagnosis debate makes perfect sense. If ADHD is a disease, then the important questions are how many people have it, whether we’re finding them all, whether we’re finding people who don’t actually have it, and what we should do about it medically once we’ve found them. These are reasonable questions to ask about a disease.

But here’s the question I’ve been asking since before most of the researchers in this debate had published their first paper: if ADHD is a disease, why does ten percent of the human population have it?

Why have we always had it? Why do the genetic variants associated with these traits trace back not just through recorded history but through our Neanderthal ancestors?

Why, when researchers study one of the last remaining nomadic populations on earth, the Ariaal people of Kenya, do they find that the same genetic variants that predict struggle and low status in settled agricultural communities predict better nutrition and higher social standing in the nomadic ones?

Darwin’s natural selection is not sentimental. It doesn’t carry a ten percent disease load across hundreds of thousands of years out of oversight or inertia. When a trait persists in the human genome at that frequency for that long, across that many environments and populations, it’s not persisting because nobody got around to editing it out.

It’s persisting because it does something that works. Because somewhere in the equation of human survival and human flourishing, it is still pulling its weight.

The researchers in the British Journal of Psychiatry are asking how many people have this disease and how do we make sure they get treated. I want to ask a different question. I want to ask what natural selection knows that the British Journal of Psychiatry doesn’t.

The answer, I think, is that natural selection has been running a much longer study with a much larger sample size, and its findings suggest that what we call ADHD is not a malfunction. It is, instead, an alternative operating system.

One that was exquisitely suited to the environment in which human beings spent the vast majority of their existence, and that remains suited to a significant range of environments today, including some of the most demanding and consequential ones we have in our modern world: Emergency medicine. Entrepreneurship. Combat. Crisis response. The arts. Any field where the premium is on pattern recognition, rapid adaptation, tolerance for uncertainty, and the ability to hyperfocus on a moving target.

The mismatch isn’t between a healthy brain and a broken brain. It is between an ancient brain and a modern institution.

The school, the open-plan office, the standardized test, the forty-hour week of repetitive structured tasks: these are extraordinarily recent inventions on the timescale of human evolution.

The brains sitting inside them, however, are not recent inventions at all. Some of those brains were built for a world that ran on different rules, and when you put them in an environment that rewards only the traits they have the least of, they look disordered. Of course they do. If you measure a hawk by its ability to swim you’ll conclude there’s something wrong with the hawk.

What I find most telling — and troubling — about the overdiagnosis debate is how it makes everyone anxious in opposite directions but leaves the basic framework completely untouched.

The people who worry about overdiagnosis are worried that we’re pathologizing normal human variation, which is a legitimate concern dressed in the wrong clothes, because the problem isn’t the rate of diagnosis, it’s the concept of pathology they’re both starting from.

The people who worry about underdiagnosis are worried that suffering people aren’t getting help, which is also legitimate and also dressed in the wrong clothes, because the help available is almost entirely calibrated toward managing the traits rather than understanding and deploying them.

Nobody in this argument is asking whether the measuring stick is the right one. Nobody is questioning whether a world that has organized itself entirely around Farmer virtues — consistency, compliance, linear attention, deferred reward, tolerance for repetition — and then diagnoses as disordered everyone who can’t perform those virtues at an acceptable level, might itself have something to answer for.

The researchers are calling for better funding, better workforce training, faster access to assessment. These are good things. I support them. But they’re just improvements to a system whose operating premise I’ve been challenging since 1993, and nobody in the current debate seems particularly interested in that challenge.

Here is what I know after thirty years of living and working in this field. The Hunters among us don’t need the medical establishment to agree on whether there are too many or too few of us. They need a story about themselves that is true, that is empowering, and that gives them a framework for understanding why certain environments break them and others make them extraordinary.

They need to know that the traits causing them trouble in the waiting room, in the classroom, in the cubicle, are the same traits that kept the species alive long enough to build waiting rooms and classrooms and cubicles in the first place.

That is not a story the overdiagnosis debate can tell. It’s too busy arguing about how many sick people there are to notice that the sickness might be in the diagnosis itself.

I’m not against assessment or even medication; I’ve used both. I’m not against support. I’m not against making people wait less time for help that might genuinely improve their lives.

I am, however, against a conversation that has been running for thirty years without once stepping back to ask the oldest and most important question underneath it:

Not how many people have this, but why, after everything, do we still treat it as a disorder and only offer simplistic solutions?

Leave a comment

Share

When a research team from the University of Southampton and two French institutions published what may be the most comprehensive review of ADHD treatments ever conducted, the coverage was predictable. Medication works best, the headlines said. Medication is the most reliable option for children and adults. Medication, medication, medication. And that part is true, as far as it goes, and I’ll come back to it.

But there was a footnote buried in the findings that almost nobody wrote about. And in thirty years of watching the way the medical establishment talks about ADHD, I’ve learned that the thing nobody writes about is often the most interesting thing in the room.

The study, published in The BMJ, examined more than 200 meta-analyses covering every significant ADHD treatment approach researchers have studied. Medication. Cognitive behavioral therapy. Neurofeedback. Diet. Exercise. Parent training. Even mindfulness.

The researchers looked at short-term effects, medium-term effects, and where the data existed, long-term effects. What they found at extended follow-up — meaning the outcomes that lasted, the ones that held up after the studies ended and the participants went back to their actual lives — was that medication’s advantage shrank considerably.

Short-term, the pills are clearly the most powerful tool available. Long-term, the picture gets murkier, partly because almost nobody has bothered to study long-term outcomes rigorously, which is a scandal in its own right given how many people take these medications for decades.

The one intervention that showed large benefits at extended follow-up was mindfulness.

Not a little benefit. Not a marginal, statistically-significant-but-clinically-modest benefit. Large benefits. The kind of finding that, if it had been attached to a pharmaceutical compound, would have been on the front page of every newspaper that covered the story.

Instead it got a sentence, a caveat about the limited evidence base, and then the coverage moved on to talk about the pills some more.

Here’s why that finding didn’t surprise me at all, and why I think the limited evidence base is itself part of the story.

Mindfulness, in its most basic form, is the practice of bringing your full attention to the present moment. Not to the meeting you have tomorrow or the thing you said badly last week or the seventeen tabs open in your browser. Here. Now. This breath, this sensation, this moment.

For Farmer brains, this is apparently quite difficult to learn and requires sustained instruction and practice. For Hunter brains, it is something else entirely.

Think about what hunting actually requires. Not the romantic movie version, but the real thing, the way our ancestors did it for hundreds of thousands of years before anyone plowed a field.

You’re tracking an animal across terrain that is trying to kill you in at least four different ways simultaneously. Your attention can’t be on the past or the future, or be divided across abstract concerns. It has to be fully, completely, almost violently present.

The snap of a twig. The shift in the wind. The way the grass is bent fifteen yards ahead. Everything that is not this moment is noise, and noise gets you killed or send you home hungry.

That quality of present-moment awareness is not a skill that Hunter brains lack: it’s a skill that Hunter brains were built for. What we lack, or rather what we struggle with, is the ability to summon it on demand for tasks that our nervous systems correctly identify as not worth hunting.

You can’t make a Hunter brain go fully present for a thing it has assessed as trivial. But you can teach a Hunter brain to recognize what full presence feels like, to return to it deliberately, and to use it as an anchor when the Farmer world is pulling in seventeen directions at once.

That is what mindfulness does. And it makes complete sense that the benefits would compound over time, because mindfulness isn’t a treatment that works while you’re receiving it and fades when you stop, the way medication does. It’s a skill. Once you have it, you have it. The Hunter who learns to hunt doesn’t forget how to hunt when the teacher goes home.

The researchers were careful to note that the evidence base for mindfulness in ADHD is still limited compared to the evidence base for medication, and that’s a fair point.

But I’d ask you to consider why the evidence base is limited. Mindfulness doesn’t have a pharmaceutical company behind it. Nobody is funding a thirty-year, multi-site longitudinal study of meditation because nobody can patent it.

The research that gets done is the research that gets funded, and the research that gets funded is the research that has a product attached to it. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s how medical research has worked for as long as there has been medical research.

The fact that mindfulness showed up as strongly as it did in the extended follow-up data, despite receiving a tiny fraction of the research investment that medication has received, strikes me as significant in a way the headlines completely missed.

Now, about the medication finding, because I want to be straightforward about it.

Yes, the study confirmed that medication is the most reliable short-term treatment for ADHD symptoms. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that for some Hunters in some circumstances, medication is genuinely transformative, and dismissing it categorically does real harm to real people who need it.

What this study adds to that picture, though, is something I’ve been arguing for years: medication is a tool, not a solution. It does something specific, in a specific timeframe, and the effects are real while you’re taking it.

What it doesn’t do is teach you anything. It doesn’t change how you understand yourself. It doesn’t build the kind of durable, portable skill that you carry with you into every room you’ll ever be in for the rest of your life.

Mindfulness does that. So does understanding yourself as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world, which is why I’ve spent thirty years arguing that the story matters as much as the prescription. When you understand why your brain works the way it does, when you stop fighting your own nature and start working with it, you develop something no pill can provide: a relationship with your own mind that actually functions.

I’ve seen this play out in my own life. When I began practicing mindfulness meditation years ago, I realized it wasn’t trying to turn my Hunter brain into a Farmer brain. It was teaching me how to return to the kind of intense present-moment awareness that Hunters evolved to have in the first place — and to do it intentionally, even in the middle of the modern world.

The researchers who put this study together did something genuinely useful by building a public interactive tool that lets patients and clinicians explore all the treatment evidence together, which is the kind of shared decision-making approach that respects people’s intelligence and autonomy. I’d encourage anyone navigating these decisions to use it. The address is ebiadhd-database.org.

But I’d also encourage you to notice what the biggest ADHD treatment study in history quietly found when it looked past the first six weeks and asked what actually lasts.

It found the one thing that teaches Hunters to be at home in their own minds. The thing that doesn’t require a prescription, doesn’t have side effects, and gets better the longer you practice it.

They buried it in a footnote. I thought you should know it was there.

Leave a comment