Dr. K explains time blindness in ADHD and how it is the hidden deficit that makes planning, punctuality, and follow-through so hard. He breaks down how an impaired internal clock and poor retrospective time perception (not tracking how long things actually take) lead to procrastination, chronic lateness, and undervaluing an hour. Then he offers clear, workable fixes that rebuild your sense of time. Topics include: Why ADHD brains misjudge how long tasks take (and why that wrecks planning) Over/under-estimating time: how it stalls motivation and starts the procrastination loop The “value of an hour” problem and why wasting time feels cheap Practical tools: timers, alarms, calendars, and logging real task durations Sensory-based learning to retrain time estimation (use a visible clock, write it down) Dr. Micaela’s tips: break routines into minute-by-minute steps and add distraction cushions This episode reframes lateness and “laziness” as solvable timing issues and gives you a simple system to start showing up on time. HG Coaching : https://bit.ly/46bIkdo Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health: https://bit.ly/44z3Szt HG Memberships : https://bit.ly/3TNoMVf Products & Services : https://bit.ly/44kz7x0 HealthyGamer.GG: https://bit.ly/3ZOopgQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Hey, y'all, just a reminder that in addition to these awesome videos, we have a ton of tools and resources to help you grow and overcome the challenges that you face. We've got things like Dr. K's Guide to Mental Health, personalized coaching programs, and things like free community events and other sorts of tools to help you no matter where you are on your mental health journey.
So check out the link in the description below and back to the video. Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy Gamer GG podcast. I'm Dr. Alok Kanodja, but you can call me Dr. K. I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer. On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you.
So let's dive right in. It's noon on a Monday and you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, man, I have homework. And your brain is like, yeah, it can be you at 1 p.m. on Monday, one hour from now, you could be done with that task. And then you're like, damn, this is the last piece of homework I have for the next three days.
I could have I could relax for the next three days if I just sit down and do one hour of work right now. But if your brain is like, oh, This is going to take three days. This piece of homework has suddenly become a dissertation. So today we're going to talk about time blindness in ADHD.
As a psychiatrist, this is the thing that causes the most damage to my patients' lives that they are unaware of as a problem with ADHD. So what do I mean by that? So in ADHD, like we're all aware that there are attentional problems, right? I have difficulty concentrating. I get distracted easily. We know that there are problems with things like emotional regulation.
So it's hard to regulate my emotions. I sort of get angry easily or I get frustrated very easily. So we're aware of some of these deficits in ADHD. But time blindness is one of these deficits that we don't sort of think about quite as much. even though it has profound impacts on our life. So I've seen time blindness lead to things like divorce.
So these are spouses who are chronically late to things, who can't be counted on to follow through and stick with plans. I've also seen graduate students that I've worked with who will get sort of threatened or even kicked out of programs because they can't meet deadlines. So let's take something simple like procrastination. So we all know that people with ADHD procrastinate.
It's a part of the disease, right? It's a part of this executive function deficit where we have difficulty planning and executing tasks. So if I were to ask you, if you've got ADHD, how long would it take you to do your homework? you'd say something like, I have no way of knowing because it could take 30 minutes or it could take three days because that's our experience with ADHD.
Our brain has no way to calculate how much time a task will take. Now, we make a fundamental mistake here, which is that we think that the reason we can't calculate it is because it's so inconsistent, but that's technically not true. There's actually an impairment in our brain's ability to estimate time. Now, if your brain cannot calculate
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