I wonder if there is a correlation between ADHD and Myers Briggs personality types. I am INFJ.
ADHD and Myers Briggs: I wonder if... - CHADD's Adult ADH...
ADHD and Myers Briggs
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Tajmapaul
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I am ENTP. I was under the impression the Perception part had a tie to ADHD. I think someone on this message board may have mentioned that.
Research has suggested it is inconclusive in comparison to others without adhd. As for the cognitive function of judging or perceiving, it’s more so how we interact with the world outside of us rather than what we do inside. Adhd is not due to an outside issue rather than inside, so it affects the way you process information in sensing and intuition. How you carry out and interact cannot be a factor regardless due to the decisions made to interact already being affected due to problems with how it’s processed before it goes out. This is a huge problem when it comes to how we treat those with disability rather than what is done in context.
No clue but I am ENTJ.
I have been thinking about this for months and would agree that there is a significant correlation. My assumption is based on the different neurotransmitter deficiencies each of the 3 different subtypes of ADHD have. Granted we share deficiencies in certain neurotransmitters, but the different deficiencies in different neurotransmitters has a lot to do with our personality types, and of course not disregarding the nurture element of upbringing.
I have Inattentive ADHD and myself am a INTJ-P, nicknamed "the mastermind". This personality type is known to be the most introverted and have one of the most analytical minds. I have played thousands of shows with bands and as a solo artist, have acted, done improve; the only thing for me is that I do not like being around people, sometimes and for short periods of time is fine, but anything more would get me upset. Granted not every Inattentive Type is highly introverted, there are different varying degrees due to outsourcing factors like culture, upbringing, etc. But I would agree that there is a higher frequency, statistically speaking, of those who are Inattentive Types who would have a letter "I" if they were to take the Myers Briggs personality test.
The Hyperactive types and Combine types I know and have worked with are a completely different story haha. The brain of someone with ADHD is under stimulated, and needs to be stimulated. From my studies I have learned that there is a deficiency in Serotonin for both Hyperactive Types and Combined types, which makes it difficult for one to be at ease. If Serotonin levels are low, there is going to be an inclination to seek company in order to bring Serotonin up through interacting with people or doing an activity around people, this is an unconscious action. I also recently learned that there is a transporter error with the neurotransmitter Acetylcholine which has to do with mood changes, body coordination, muscle aches, and learning disability. Putting some of that information together demonstrates, to me that there is a significant correlation in subtype of ADHD and personality type. Also considering that for Combined types, the ratio of Hyperactive and Inattentive is not fully 50/50. I've met combined types who are 70% inattentive and 30% hyperactive (they have mentioned this to me from what their psychiatrist has told them), and once I interact with them I can clearly see that assumption of ratio is spot on. And of course vice versa. The joke I have with some of my combined type friends is, that their inattentive side is going to suffer the consequences of what their hyperactive side gets them into, sort of like a jekel and hyde thing. Anyway just my theory, I often hyperfocus on abstract ideas such as this.
I'm a combined type. So.. maybe that's why I have a the ENTP. I've also gotten ENFP, lol. I guess it depends on what kind of a day I'm having.
Totally know that feeling man haha. My brother is a combined type as well and could be Mother Teresa one day and be Joseph Stalin the next day if he doesn't get enough sleep.
OH don't get me started about getting enough sleep. I remember not long after I met my wife, I had a crazy binge on writing music for days and needed to go to work on no sleep. I ended up hitting a parked car. Actually it was my now mother in law's car right in front of mine while I thought I was backing out of the driveway it turns out I was in drive.
If you think of a normal person's focus as a normal distribution with a somewhat small std deviation and a regular ADDer as a much much larger standard deviation, my focus on no sleep is literally a uniform distribution... I'm a wreck.
I'm also combined type and I'm the same way with sleep. I'm so happy and outgoing when I've had sleep, but am a complete anxious monster without it.
Lack of sleep and the many issues it brings, ADHD problems. The double edged sword is that unfortunately it's also difficult to go to bed for many people with Adhd. Before I started taking my medication and supplements I used to have to watch a video or show and then go to sleep, and this would be like an hour ordeal, and God forbid what I watched had a cliffhanger. I would tell friends that just going to sleep felt boring. Little did I know it was because of having ADHD and needing the stimulation.
Same, it's 2AM here and I'm still awake but exhausted. I just can't shut my brain off. I usually do better if I have a really boring show on in the background, but like you said if an interesting part comes on then it's game over!
This actually makes a lot of sense considering it’s hard to take in the information to process to begin with. Excellent find!
At the last you talk about the joke you have with your combined type friends-- that is EXACTLY how I am feeling right now! My new job is slow and I have been laid off a day here, two days there, every week for a month. I don't feel that I am being trained as fast as I am able and hungry to learn and now the workload has diminished. I have no transportation to go anywhere and am hitching a ride to work with my coworker so I couldn't go out and pick up another job if I wanted to. Instead, I cooked up a business startup idea, practically overnight and in the next two days off, write a business plan, got the ball rolling on a business loan to purchase a location, got a mentor on board and a commercial customer who will likely provide 1/4 of my business. The business idea is for Idaho and I am 1200 miles away in Alaska. I fly back to Idaho on other personal business in a week and hope to wrap up some details about this business startup idea at the same time. But now I find out my friend can't pick me up from the airport when I fly in and my vehicle he has been storing for me needs repairs (I knew these repairs needed to be done sooner than later but didn't expect them to happen like this). I am dead in the water without transportation and wondering how to get myself out of this pickle! I already had a full trip planned with my personal business, then I tripled my workload with the startup idea and complicated everything with a dead vehicle and purchasing my ticket before I verified my friend's availability to pick me up. Got myself in over my head, just because I was laid off for two days. The hyperactive couldn't handle the slow training and then the layoffs but the inattentive forgot some important details and time blindness never helps one see the reality of how long something will take to pull off either."The joke I have with some of my combined type friends is, that their inattentive side is going to suffer the consequences of what their hyperactive side gets them into, sort of like a jekel and hyde thing."
I really relate to your theory! Especially right now.
Dang, sorry to hear man, and the cherry on the flipping cake is that it was your mother-in-law's car out of all people. Totally understand, especially the writing music part, I could write/record music for 12hrs straight and it feels like only an hour. It's that crazy hyperfocus we have, not to mention the crazy reward system boost we are getting while doing so.
I like the stats analogy haha. Same here, unfortunately though since I am a full Inattentive type, I get extremely irritable and do not want to speak or interact with anyone on top of being slower than a lawn mower. Thanks to supplements like N-Acetyl Tyrosine and L-Tryptophan, I am much better on lesser hours of sleep.
OMG That's hilarious. I just looked up ENFP. Sounds like combined type to me...
"An ENFP needs to focus on following through with their projects. This can be a problem area for some of these individuals. Unlike other Extraverted types, ENFPs need time alone to center themselves, and make sure they are moving in a direction which is in sync with their values. ENFPs who remain centered will usually be quite successful at their endeavors. Others may fall into the habit of dropping a project when they become excited about a new possibility, and thus they never achieve the great accomplishments which they are capable of achieving. "
I’m INFP
ENTP, here. I joke about being only a few letters short of full entropy. I run into a lot of overlap between MBTI “N” groups and ADHD groups in which I circulate.
Keep in mind, sensing types, whow to take everything at face value without further processing are the vast majority of the population. N types tend toward deeper evaluations, and guess what, those of us with ADHD generally CAN'T shut down that additional processing.
Because MBTI transposes J/P depending on F/T (driving Jungian typology purists utterly batty), the remaining axes come out mixed: I can't really be certain whether I see more TP and FJ than other, or not.
INFJ is the rarest type, so it probably winds up catching more than its share of neurodivergents.
BTW, in a zombie apocalypse, I'll be the one inventing the cool, new weapons built by my INTP partner in McGyvering.
Yep. In fact I feel like my “deeper evaluation” often causes me trouble at work because I can’t seem to feel like I understand something unless I fully grasp it. The mathematicians at work hate it because, while it seems like their field trained them well to accept a theorem or lemma without further knowledge or understanding, I constantly require more context and details for form my intuition.
What I’ve noticed is that my intuition of really complicated topics generally far surpasses their comprehension but while my intuition seems superior in many ways, my vocabulary often does not match theirs. This causes me to explain things as I see them in my head. I’ll often times told I’m missing the point because they don’t understand the way I’m explaining it, only to find out later that I knew exactly what I was taking about and often they were actually missing some key points that I intuited automatically.
It’s a blessing and a curse. My brain works fast but it’s not the most efficient and so I think that’s why I’ve excelled at programming instead of mathematics (hence why data science seems to come easier to me, since it’s more of an applied mathematics area).
Anyways, my point is that it’s frustrating having a very visual type of brain that can put complex abstract concepts into images to help my intuition. I’m not saying my images are always correct just on first try, but they get better the more I learn. Recently I’ve been really into tensor factorization from a collaborative filtering perspective. Some of my revelations on the topic have baffled the mathematicians and they were quick to dismiss, until they realized I know exactly what I’m taking about, I just don’t have 1) a degreee in math and 2) the right vocabulary all the time, (mostly as a result of #1)
I believe some of this is linked to the way I had to survive and adapt in school. I never could learn as a child in a classroom full of other students. Because of this, I had to learn everything on my own, I believe this is what gave me a powerful intuition for concepts rather than just believing a list of “rules” because someone says they are true.
I'm every bit as verbal as visual; but there is never enough time to develop the vocabulary others may have established. (Sometimes, I tread where there is none, as yet; but I don't have a good basis to invent one with any hope of traction, either.)
You'll probably see your own pattern repeated in my encounter with an interviewer who, when I spoke of “number of combinations of ‘m’ items taken ‘n’ at a time” couldn't grasp I was referring to C<m,n> (which he was seeking) because I didn't use the (much more convenient) verbal shorthand “m choose n”, which my professors happened to avoid for some unknown reason. Similar has occurred when I've referred to “order of complexity” with those who only understood the words, “big ‘O’ notation”—even though they read ‘O(...)’ as “order ...”: they could only be satisfied with reference to another denotation, and not the correct denotation of the concept itself!
Some of those professors, by the way, were quick to recognize I was one of the few who understood their topics from first principles: I would be the only one to solve problems that failed to yield to “plug and chug” rote formulae, or to find reliable ways of solving a problem without resorting to next week's subject matter (a “cheat”, by my reckoning, but exactly how most others bypassed what would otherwise be random guesswork).
Sure, I wasn't as rapid to produce an answer, but I wouldn't be misled to a wrong one, either. Nevertheless, integral calculus drove me nuts because I could NOT commit the identities I needed to memory without working through their derivations, repeatedly—but, at least, then I could tell whether there was any point in trying them on a problem that tempted wasting time with the wrong ones.
In my career, recognizing geometrically growing problems others would miss BEFORE they blew up in everyone's faces, has long been my bane: because the coming crisis never happened, my preventing it would be deemed wasted time and I'd suffer adverse comparisons to others whose fast, shoddy work created the problem in the first place—never mind that most of my lost time was spent trying to avoid fixing the problem because I knew it would draw fire. That cultural conflict (being watchful for what would steal more time from future work if not handled dinner rather than later) cost me one job before I was able to solidify an exit (I had been looking, while working my arse off, concurrently).
I have long since reached the point where I can barely say, “No, we WON'T catch it in test: it is not possible to cover that in finite time,” without biting someone's head off.
LOL! Yeah the m choose n thing always got me. Recently, tensor factorization, neural nets, and probabilistic graphic models have been the talk of my team @ work. Though we're all data scientists, I have a comp sci background and the rest of the team has math backgrounds.
I've been hyperfocused over Bayesian methods for the past several months- Judea Pearl's belief propagation, markov networks, Bayesian networks, Bayesian neural networks, Bayesian tensor factorization, ELBOs, Variational inference, Kalman/Particle filtering/Monte carlo methods, information theory, etc.... The problem is, often I have the intuition about what these things are doing but can't necessarily stand at a board and model them through arithmetic. It's not that I'm not capable of doing that. I know maths. I also need to stop blaming absolutely everything on my brain.
The reality is that I'm a comp sci guy who's just now getting infatuated with math because I got excited about AI during my masters degree (and its one of the major factors that made me want to pursue a PhD). These other guys are all mathematics PhDs who aren't necessarily the best practical problem solvers. I believe that to be my superpower on the team.
I want to know more about the arithmetic and math because I think it gives me a much more powerful perspective on the possibilities of the algorithms but I also need to compassionate with myself and why I don't yet have those abilities. Otherwise, I'm just going to discourage myself and stop trying....
Anyways, I find math to be so hard because there seems to be so many different angles in which to view things. Especially in the land of machine learning. You've got concrete equations that can be interpreted as other things... and then re-interpreted. In comp sci, we never had a huge focus on proofs so this could be where I struggle. So I'll gain an intuition for a few different perspectives of an algorithm or an approach to modeling and it seems like all the mathematicians have to do is look @ the equation and they see so many more perspectives that I ever would have. Like proving that "X is really the same as Y when we use this type of equation instead". This is fascinating to me recently because I'm seeing so many things being interpreted as Bayesian inference which seemed to have absolutely nothing in common at first. LaPlace was really quite a fellow. I'd love to know what he would be thinking right now seeing how our future largely depends on his work!
I'm also an INFJ
I am an INFP. Stay at home mom of 2 boys who are 2 & 4.5yrs old. Lol... I thought I knew so much about MBTI since I grew up hearing about it as a regular subject in my home and also about ADHD since I was diagnosed 23 yrs ago and it runs in the family but reading some of these comments, wow! Where do you guys get your info??
Not that I know of and I have read a lot of books about ADHD. BTW I am an INTP
I have a zombie death ray for you to build while I go about trying to resurrect the internet.
A high powered laser would work quite nicely. Come to think of it - I wonder why none of the zombie movies use lasers as that would be cool. They seem to go old school.
Resurrect the internet? Like when Netscape was the only browser and was full of useful information. I am probably followed by the government as I check out the MIT censorbait page often.
Yeah, there goes that purple light, again.
Mostly useless information, nowadays; but I was referring to somebody's notion, somewhere on “teh intarwebz”, of what ENTPs would be doing in a post-apocalypse scenario.
Included notions of most having vanished and finding swirling portals in garages (do not touch, of course) and other signs we expected it all along, possibly with one of us having triggered it out of the same, sheer contrariness that'll argue a point just for fun.
Keep in mind, engineering is simply as close as I can get to mad science without being independently wealthy on a Bill Gates kind of level.
From free super scientific internet tests, I come up as either INFP or INFJ. I'm an inattentive type.
Well it looks like most people that replied at least have the intuitive N in common.
ADHD predisposes us to falling into the 15% “N” minority because we keep processing, consciously, beyond where a neurotypical brain would stop (predisposing them to the 85% “S” majority).
As I have mentioned elsewhere (possibly including this discussion—I've slept since), I observe noticeably higher prevalence of ADHD in gatherings of “N types”. (There happens to be such a Meetup group near where I live, right now, and it's holding true there, too.) Both groups tend to form spontaneous subcultures with their own (similar, I might add) social rules, so we recognize each other quickly.
ESTP. I'm combined type.
I've come to the conclusion that I'm an extravert who, when I was very little, lost the ability to be stimulated by simple everyday conversation with people. Thus- I ended up finding other outlets to "chase the dopamine" and ended up not missing out on the important skills that other children were getting by being present and socializing with people.
I'm bringing this up because it was quite surprising to find out that I'm an ENTP/ENFP. I always thought I was an introvert but I'm starting to think I've been miserable for years because I gain energy by interacting with others even though I don't always have the skills I need to interact with them (e.g. I come off as narcissistic often talking about the thoughts racing around / ruminating in my head, even though I have just as much empathy as anyone else).
ENFP! Predominantly inattention.
INFJ with ADHD here... before diagnosis I would beat myself up for not being able to be/stay as organized as I wanted to be. I could be super organized at work, but a mess at home. After my recent diagnosis and meds I've started organizing my whole house (room by room) and getting my whole life in order. I'm still experimenting with planners and scheduling things, but I feel like I can fully use my INFJ traits to their fullest. I'm still a work in progress but it's getting better.
I'd say either INTP for add and ENTP for ADHD because we are definitely intuitive, definitely prospecting and arguably thinking. Take it from an INTP with ADHD.
My Mum used to be a psychologist (she lost her degree when we moved countries) and I remember her telling me that the free online test isn't all that accurate. You can get it done by certified people who will ask much more in-depth questions than the ones online, they take into account things like your age, country and culture and illnesses to make sure that those things don't affect a result that's meant to be about your personality and ONLY your personality.
The online test because it does a bad job at separating things that to US are symptoms, from things that show our actual personalities, like questions about "how often do you space out and think about intriguing ideas". Because while for a neurotypical person, that would be effected solely by their personality type, but for someone with ADHD it's not just your personality that affects how you act. The test is meant to find your personality, if the results that are affected by other factors, it means that the test is invalid.
While experiences with ADHD would affect our personalities and some areas of ADHD do affect our personalities, a mental illness isn't the same as a personality type.
I think that there WOULD still be a correlation between MBTI results in people with ADHD, the online test would show a whole lot more correlation than one performed by an expert with a test designed to eliminate variables like ADHD from the results.
ENTP - combined type. Inattentive and impulsive. Much easier to manage as I've gotten older.
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