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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Normal enough for adhd that it was even one of my assessment questions!
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.
Oh, a new symptom. I was wondering why I was doing that. Also watching dozens of Crunchyroll series at the same time.
This is what it’s like for me too, especially now, like @tiefling@lemmy.blahaj.zone said in their comment, that movies seem to be longer now.
I’ve got loads of movies at home or on streaming services that I want to watch, but because so many are over two hours long, and essentially have a ritual around them of getting your drinks and snacks together and doing nothing else, I don’t bother putting them on. I’ll sit there for hours and watch something short like Futurama though.
I’ve even got to the stage where if an episode of something is longer than about 45 minutes, I struggle to decide to watch that too.
I have a hard time watching stuff without also doing other stuff. like posting here. watching kickass. and doing housework.
Keeping focus for a whole movie can be tough yeah.
it works way better if i’ve taken my meds( huge suprise, i know :D) and even better in a cinema opposed to watching on tv or phone, i guess the big screen and proper sound system are just more engaging and there is less distraction.
If i watch a movie at home i often do it by watching it in like 30 minute episodes, because otherwise i end up rewinding multiple times anyway and that’s frustrating, so i rather take a break from it if my brain won’t cooperate.
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.
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 tend to. The one exception is movies I have watched many times. I still enjoy those, but mostly because I don’t have to pay close attention to know what is going on. I can watch my favorite parts and ignore the rest without getting confused.
Sometimes I break movies up into multiple days of watching.
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.)
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!
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 have the opposite problem of getting really sucked into movies. Unless it is really bad I will ignore everything around me.
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.
Some films have slow pacing, and I struggle to pay attention. Most of the time I watch at 1.25x speed.
