IDK if this is a normal thing for people with ADHD but do you guys find it hard to watch movies? There always super slow paced and require hours worth of your attention. I can watch movies but only if I really try and that’s a very draining experience. I only like watching movies if I’m really high.
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I don’t mind watching movies, but it’s really hard for me to DECIDE to watch a movie.
If someone asks if I want to watch a movie, the time commitment makes me say no (unless it’s something I’ve REALLY wanted to see), but I’ll happily agree to watch a TV show and still end up watching 3 hours or more worth of episodes.
I came here to say the same thing. It’s especially bad with streaming services. Row and column after row and column of options is overwhelming.
My wife is in charge of the remote for exactly that reason. I trust her judgement and I don’t waste 2 hours scrolling through nothing.
Normal enough for adhd that it was even one of my assessment questions!
I use VLC and watch at double speed for most things. Honestly I just skip movies and TV mostly but the stuff I do watch is at double speed for most things, sometimes 1.5x because people look weird moving fast when they are doing action scenes.
Now podcasts and audio books on the other hand are very amenable to increased speeds. The narrator increasing the speed just increases the rate of intake, the mental simulation is still at a reasonable speed, just less time waiting.
Does anyone know why the double speed thing works? It’s very effective for me too, I usually keep video at 1.5x often will have to jump it up to 2x to be able to handle it
I can only speak for myself but if I have a fast enough input my spare resources are low, so I can’t think about something else easily. This means I don’t find something more interesting or forget what I am doing. I think neurotypical people enjoy pacing in a way I find impossible. They like the anticipation, the waiting can build the experience, whereas my internal systems just get hired and drop the boring thing rather than building anticipation.
I watched “Everything Everywhere All at Once”. But I watched parts of it while doing other things over the space of 2 years.
I honestly watch about 1 or 2 movies per year.
Sometimes I break movies up into multiple days of watching.
I minored in Film Studies in college and never had a problem, these days its a lot more difficult, cant decide if my symptoms changed over the course of 15 years or if its the advent of smart phones and growth of the internet over that time.
I have always had zero trouble warching engaging movies, especially if they move at a decent pace or the slowness builds up anticipation. I still have trouble keeping track of character names and sometimes forget the details, but staying engaged is often easy.
A boring movie though, I can watch for 30 minutes and not remember anything that happened because my mind wandered. Basically the movie or show version of realizing you weren’t paying attention to the last 10 pages in a book.
i only watch movies, or any fiction on tv, if someone insist me to do it
I can’t do it. I have to be actively making decisions and having agency in my entertainment. I end up playing video games, or board games.
(The board games I end up playing are usually the sorts of solitaire board games with a huge campaign and a grand sweeping narrative. My favorite board game of all time is Etherfields, for example.)
I’m always doing something else while watching a movie. I often rewind 30 seconds because I missed something important. But I find most movies have so much that I don’t care about… So I focus on whatever else until I realize that I’ve missed something.
While we’re here anyone wanna suggest attention grabbing movies? I’ll start,
Faster (2010)
Infra-man is the last movie I was able to endure.
Absolutely. Movies are often slow, and because they rely on visual storytelling more than tv, so I can’t even be doing something else while watching them. A trick that worked for me was starting 15/20 minutes into the movie, that way stuff is actually happening rather than some slow setup, and I get the extra challenge of trying to figure out what’s happening and what I’ve missed which keeps my brain busy. Then, if I enjoy the movie, I’ve got an extra 15 minutes to watch later as a bonus!
That’s quite interesting because I experience something very similar but reversed. I enjoy watching movies sober, I am very particular with what I watch but if it’s interesting I have no problem investing in the story. Whereas if I’m high, I generally only enjoy watching TV shows - my attention span becomes similarly episodic.
Typically I get easily distracted or bored during movies. The only exception in recent years was Oppenheimer. It had such a fantastic pacing that the three hours rushed by and I didn’t pick up my phone even once. It was incredible.
