One of the main myths about people with ADHD is that we just can’t sustain effort.
“She won’t stick with anything.”
“He starts strong and then begins to drift off.”
It would kind of run face-first into a group of people who routinely spend as many as thirty consecutive hours doing one single thing, in the heat, all alone with nobody watching and no prize waiting at the end.
But there they are. Looking at 601 long-distance runners (marathoners and ultra-marathoners, average age 43) in France, Switzerland, and Spain, researchers ran them through the ASRS-5, the standard five-question screen for adult ADHD. Fully a tenth of them scored as Hunters, a rate around three times what you’d find in the general population.
It was the first time I can find where anybody bothered to look for ADHD among this population, and there it was! So, what’s this all about? After all, if ADHD is a “deficit of sustained effort,” the results should have come out that the trait was barely perceptible among ultra-marathoners.
The confusion comes from Farmers making conclusions about what “attention” is and how it works for Hunters. They argue that it means sitting at a desk for hours doing boring schoolwork or turning a bolt on a screw over and over again for 8 hours a day in a factory.
What Hunters know is that the way attention works for us is that we lock onto a target and, if it’s interesting, we’ll refuse to let it go for as long as it takes.
That’s not some kind of wild-assed metaphor that I invented for a book. It’s how our ancestors actually survived.
Long before we humans had invented the bow or even the spear thrower, we hunted by outlasting our prey. Pick an animal and run it down, with the human advantage of hairless skin and long legs that don’t overheat as fast as furry animals do when chased.
Two decades ago, scientists Bramble and Lieberman laid out the anatomical case for this, posting that endurance running is a “derived capability of the genus Homo” that dates back at least two million years. That experience shaped both our bodies and our minds.
Consider what that would involved: Hours of continuous tracking of the prey; constant scanning for a print, broken branch, or a footprint in the dust; the ability to single-mindedly hold that one goal even as the landscape scrolls by. It would require huge tolerance for discomfort, uncertainty, and the very real possibility that you’d end up coming home empty-handed.
Much of this is right in the middle of that ADHD diagnosis. But for the ADHD runners, their marathons were simply that hunt — and the persistence it demanded — without the animal or the meal at the end.
That same research team — using that same runner cohort — also delved into their experiences of anxiety and their ability to easily sleep (poor sleep is often informally associated with ADHD; I don’t think I’ve slept an entire night in my life).
What they found was that about a quarter of them regularly experienced anxiety, another thing frequently associated with ADHD (although there’s a debate about why; could it just be from growing up misunderstood as a Hunter in a Farmer’s world?).
I can’t begin to recall how many Hunters have told me anecdotally that exercise, particularly running or mountain-climbing, was their best ADHD therapy. That it calmed them down for days, helped them concentrate, and made them feel more whole and less anxious. People who can’t sit through a 40-minute meeting at work are running 10 kilometer races and loving it.
Louise and I walk at least a mile together every day, and climb a mountain every weekend (and we’re in our 70s); it’s our best time to talk things through, brainstorm new ideas for business or writing or our kids, and keeps us deeply bonded. I’ve never been good at sitting still, and thankfully my Farmer wife is okay with this exercise that I need to keep my brain working.
If you’re the Hunter with race medals and an otherwise scattered life, or you love one, forward this along and subscribe here so we can keep making the case together.
Ten thousand years ago our ancestors would have called the result of that race “dinner.”